Oversized beige cable-knit sweater. Middle parted hair. His right knee pointed, creating a curve in his left hip.
Almost every detail in the picture – down to the matching short set – looks familiar to Sydney Gifford. And so this woman stopped in front of a white wall with no writing.
Days before, Gifford, a 24-year-old lifestyle the promoterhe shared the photo with his thousands followers that was almost the same. The woman in the new photo is fellow influencer, Alyssa Sheil, who she went shopping with and photographed months ago.
At the time, he thought their interaction was just bad. But when she sifted through Sheil’s Instagram photos for the first time in over a year, she said, Gifford suspected the meetings were some form of beauty espionage.
Gifford says that Sheil, 21, not only started impersonating her online persona but also gave away her entire appearance. Now he is suing.
Gifford copyrighted many of her social media posts in January, after noticing similarities between Sheil’s posts and her own. Many of the photos were submitted as evidence in a lawsuit Gifford filed this year in federal court in Texas accusing Sheil of copyright infringement. But in the carefully curated world of social media, Giffords has opened up to a more serious charge: stealing her vibe.
“This didn’t happen by accident,” Gifford, who has about 300,000 followers on Instagram and more than 500,000 on TikTok, recalled thinking at the time. “Something is going on here.”
What may appear to be a skirmish over sweaters and hairstyles can actually be a legal battle that goes to the heart of social media. influence. The very nature of successful trendsetting requires a certain level of repetition. As much as platforms like TikTok and Instagram may seem like a free-for-all, lifestyle influencers exist in an ecosystem that rewards similarity – one of the surest ways to appease the algorithms that are the biggest deterrents to their online success.
As the creative economy booms, scoffing at the possibility of a lucrative livelihood, Gifford’s story seeks to define the line where acting can turn from flattering to fake.
In a series of interviews starting in August, experts said promoters must navigate a murky area when assigning credit to who created what can be scary and, in some cases, impossible.
“There’s a sense that you’re both the creator and the borrower,” says Jeanne Fromer, a professor of intellectual property law at New York University. “Fashion is built on that. All art industries – painting, music, movies – are all built on borrowing from the past in certain ways and ideally you try to bring something of your own to something. I don’t know that anyone wants to go to extremes because of that.”
Sheil said Gifford’s claims about her post were baseless and that she found them deeply offensive, as an influencer herself.
“This is how I make a living and not only that, this is my type,” said Sheil in an interview. “I feel like I need to defend myself.”
Fromer described the case as the first of its kind, where a social media user sues another — instead of the tech company behind the platform. Despite its unusual appearance, this “kitchen intellectual property claim” can proceed in court, adding that the most important claim is copyright infringement.
Depending on what comes to court, it could set an important precedent for other influencers and how they present themselves online.
‘I Didn’t Feel Welcome’
The first time Gifford and Sheil met, at an outdoor mall in Austin, Texas, Sheil felt like a third wheel.
According to Sheil, Gifford had sent her a private message on Instagram asking if she wanted to hang out with another influential friend. The women wandered around, perused the offerings at H&M and Aritzia, had lunch, and went their separate ways.
“I was definitely worried because they were friends,” said Sheil. “I didn’t really know what I was getting into as we became friends, and it worked out well.”
Gifford described the meeting as “professional,” and said it was mostly about filming content and brainstorming ideas.
“I don’t really remember who reached out to whom,” said Gifford, who now lives in Minnesota. “I know we’ve been following each other for a while, so I’m not sure who invented it.”
The three women met again next month in a parking garage in downtown Austin to take pictures together to post on their accounts. But this time, Sheil didn’t feel welcome, he said.
“I was not spoken to for the first 45 minutes to an hour when I arrived at the parking garage,” said Sheil. “Sydney also took pictures with her third friend who was there and posted them and didn’t tag me.”
When Sheil went home, he blocked Gifford from all platforms.
“I didn’t see anything wrong with stopping him,” said Sheil. “I didn’t feel welcome. I felt that that was the person I needed to have a relationship with on social media if the relationship we had in life was not good.”
How to make a living online
For Gifford, the case isn’t a matter of personal pride: it’s about protecting her business.
Gifford and Sheil both create social media content aimed at persuading their followers to buy items — rugs, coffee tables, pajama sets — from their Amazon “stores.” This is how both women make a living, and that’s what Gifford says in her lawsuit that Sheil broke the law by copying her beauty posts.
“There were a lot of people, some fans, some of my close friends, that his content appeared on their ‘For You’ page and they thought it was me, literally,” Gifford said during a video interview from Minnesota.
“Obviously they looked at the name on the account and were confused,” Gifford said of her followers, who she said alerted her to the similarity in their content. “It really touched my heart to see that.”
This confusion among his fans is mainly centered on Gifford’s suits. He also said he saw a drop in sales of his writing when Sheil made a post like his, citing data from Amazon. In the lawsuit, Gifford pointed to a list of items she says Sheil copied from her posts and sold on her Amazon storefront — items, she said, that she spends a lot of time processing.
Over the summer, Sheil’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss most of the charges in the complaint. Criticizing Gifford’s “‘throw everything at the wall and see which way to go,” Sheil’s attorneys suggested that “the gist of Gifford’s gripe is that she believes Sheil’s post and overall aesthetic is ‘very similar’ to Gifford’s.”
But that, they admit, is an unenforceable claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which only comes into play when the same work is modified or reproduced without proper copyright notice.
“Because the complaint only alleges the creation of similar images — not the reproduction of those same images,” Sheil’s lawyers said, “Gifford’s DMCA claim fails as a matter of law.”
Last month, a magistrate judge recommended that Sheil’s motion to dismiss be granted in part and denied in part. His lawyers said last month that they are still considering how they want to proceed.
The Murky Story of Copyright
In January, Gifford applied for and paid for copyrights to several of her social media posts that Sheil claims were copied. Although copyright registration gives him grounds for infringement, it does not guarantee ownership of the style, media or likeness. Instead, they’re just a ticket to court, according to Rose Leda Ehler, an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
“Do I think it’s going to make it a total crime or a big crime in the world of copyright and trademark law? No,” Ehler said in a phone interview. “I suspect that there will be negotiations outside the court and the parties will find out or resolve this issue before the case goes to trial.”
Similar cases that have been tried in the courts have had surprising results. In 2018, photographer Jacobus Rentmeester sued Nike, claiming the sportswear giant copied his image of Michael Jordan to create the company’s Jumpman logo, which it used in its iconic Air Jordan campaign.
The claim was dismissed by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit after Nike revealed that it did not use Rentmeester’s photo but hired another photographer to take the same photo. Copyrights do not protect ideas or the sweat of the brow, only speech, according to Ehler.
A similar case ten years earlier had a different outcome. In 2005, photographer Jonathan Mannion sued an advertising agency for using an altered version of a photo he took in 1999 of basketball star Kevin Garnett in a Coors Light ad. Mannion won his case after the court found that the ad company had recreated Garnett’s image by mimicking the angle, pose, composition and lighting.
Since 1884, when the first case of copyright infringement by a photograph was heard by the Supreme Court – regarding a portrait of 27-year-old Oscar Wilde – judges have been trying to find the best way to assess the work of such infringement. .
“It’s not statistically accurate by any means,” Fromer said.
Since the Gifford case, Sheil has continued to share her life with her fans. You recently wrote about buying a new home, complete with a white boucle couch.
In August, Gifford announced her first pregnancy on Instagram, wearing a cream-colored dress. She still stuck to her minimalist, beige aesthetic.