{"id":92539,"date":"2019-04-25T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/341490"},"modified":"2019-04-25T19:55:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T19:55:00","slug":"epic-games-is-facing-yet-another-lawsuit-over-a-fortnite-emote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/04\/25\/epic-games-is-facing-yet-another-lawsuit-over-a-fortnite-emote\/","title":{"rendered":"Epic Games is facing yet another lawsuit over a Fortnite emote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Epic Games has been hit with a number of lawsuits at this point over several of the emotes featured in its free-to-play battle royale game <em>Fortnite<\/em>, but the latest person to accuse Epic Games of using their likeness or dance moves without permission is taking a slightly different legal approach.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2019\/4\/25\/18516306\/fortnite-epic-games-phone-it-in-saxophone-emote-lawsuit-leo-pellegrino-likeness\">According to the Verge<\/a>, the musician Leo Pellegrino has filed a lawsuit against Epic Games that accuses the company of misappropriating his likeness for the game\u2019s &#8220;Phone It In&#8221; emote.<\/p>\n<p>Pellegrino is represented by the same law firm representing many of the other artists that have taken a legal stab at Epic Games since <em>Fortnite<\/em> rose to popularity.&nbsp;While those past cases focused on copyright infringement over the use of certain dance moves, Pellegrino is arguing that Epic\u2019s use of his \u201ctrademark moves [that] have become inseparable from his persona and his life story\u201d makes this a case of using his likeness without permission or compensation rather than copyright infringement.<\/p>\n<p>As the Verge points out, it&#8217;s likely a legal strategy intended to get around some of the roadblocks faced by the murky business of copywriting dance moves that have held up similar cases filed by Alfonso Ribeiro, 2 Milly, and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Epic Games has been hit with a number of lawsuits at this point over several of the emotes featured in its free-to-play battle royale game Fortnite, but the latest person to accuse Epic Games of using their likeness or dance moves without permission is taking a slightly different legal approach. According to the Verge, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}