A trial date of April 27th, 2020 has been scheduled in the civil lawsuit brought by tattoo artist Catherine Alexander against the WWE, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc, 2K Games Inc, 2K Sports Inc, Visual Concepts Entertainment, Yuke’s Co. Ltd and Yuke’s LA Inc in the United States District Court of Southern District of Illinois, according to a report from PWInsider.com.
The report notes that Alexander alleges that all of her tattoo work on WWE superstar Randy Orton are her original designs that she owns and that she has never given any of the defendants permission to recreate them in the WWE videogames, therefore they and other defendants have infringed on her copyrights. According to the lawsuit, Alexander stated that she performed the tattoo work on Orton between 2003-2008 and that the tattoos are easily recognized by Orton’s fans and members of the public. Alexander also noted that in advance of the lawsuit, she submitted applications to register copyrights on each of the aforementioned works on March 15th, 2018 and that she has previously contacted the WWE regarding material featuring Orton’s tattoos being sold by the company back in 2009, which at that time, WWE offered her a $450 fee for the rights to the designs, which she noted that she refused at the time.
The report adds that Alexander is claiming that by recreating the tattoos in the WWE videogames, the rights to her designs are being infringed upon and that while Randy Orton is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, Alexander claims that Orton does not have ownership in the copyrights and has no authority to and did not grant permission for the Defendants to commit the acts complained of in this Complaint. The report further notes that a settlement conference was scheduled for last month, but was cancelled due to the court ruling that it was obvious that no settlement would come from the discussions.