Take-Two is being sued for using player tattoos in NBA 2K16

Sports games, particularly from 2K Sports and EA Sports, strive for absolute realism, and part of that involves recreating characters with as much detail as the platforms they’re built for will allow – like in NBA 2K16, for example.

It’s just not realistic if you can’t see every bead of sweat, every crinkle in a uniform and every inch of a player’s tattoos, painstakingly recreated with as many pixels as a GPU can spare – at least, that seems to be the approach thus far.

Now, 2K Sports’ parent company, Take-Two, is in trouble for the realism they’ve endeavoured to produce.

Solid Oak Sketches, LLC, a tattoo studio known for doing a lot of tattoo work for big-deal sportsmen and women has filed a lawsuit (seen here) against Take-Two for copyright infringement.

According to Solid Oak Sketches, recreating those tattoos is an infringement on their intellectual property, as it’s tantamount to copying their artists’ work, which we suppose it is.

Copyright law protects those things which are “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

All of the details are contained within the suit, but the gist of it is that Solid Oak Sketches, and their lawyers, argue that tattoos qualify for copyright protection because they fulfil the two statutory requirements necessary: originality and fixation. And technically they do.

The question many are asking, then, is if an artist can own the copyright to designs that appear on the flesh of another person – in this case, the players of NBA 2K16.

Either way, it’ll be decided in court. But if the words of one Judge Catherine D. Perry are anything to go by, Solid Oak Sketches will probably win: “Of course tattoos can be copyrighted. I don’t think there is any reasonable dispute about that . . . . [T]he tattoo itself and the design itself can be copyrighted, and I think it’s entirely consistent with the copyright law.”

It’s certainly interesting.