NBA 2K makers being sued over players’ tattoos

A new lawsuit has popped up against 2K games, this time over tattoos for Kobe and Lebron in NBA 2K.

Current copyright laws maintain that tattoo artists retain the rights to all tattoos,  so game developers need to get licenses to include them in games. Apparently, tattoo artist Solid Oak Sketches is suing 2K over the tattoos for refusing to license the tattoos.

Even after the tattoo is on the players body, they strangely still have zero right to its use. Absent any written agreement, the artist themselves maintain the rights to the tattoos. This is known in the game world as it's been an issue at hand previously with the UFC and NFL in games. Solid Oak Sketches was aware of the use of their tattoos, and even submitted multiple correspondence to 2K stating as such.

According to the lawsuit, as shown by ESPN, Solid Oak Sketches offered 2K the use of the tattoos for a license fee of $1.1 million. Now, to be honest, that's borderline insanity just for some tattoos, bit it's unfortunately not going to change anytime soon. We'll have to see how this plays out as the lawsuit was just filed yesterday, February 1st in New York Federal Court.

[ESPN]