A U.S. appeals court sided with Netflix Thursday in a cameraman’s copyright case over funeral footage used in the hit 2020 docuseries, “Tiger King.”
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colo. ruled that Netflix made fair use of one of Timothy Sepi’s videos, which the videographer first sued the streamer over in 2020. The decision upheld a lower court’s ruling.
The footage in-question was a 66-second clip from a funeral of one of the “Tiger King” characters. And, after the global success of the docuseries, Sepi sued and accused the streamer of not compensating him for the footage.
Yet, the court’s decision is particularly noteworthy, given it reached the opposite conclusion back in 2024.
At the time, the court of appeals’ panel concluded that Netflix and the “Tiger King” filmmakers did not transform or comment on Sepi’s funeral footage, finding they had simply taken it.
“Defendants do not appear to have a sufficiently compelling justification for their use,” wrote Chief Judge Jerome Holmes at the time. “Defendants simply wished to use Mr. Sepi’s Funeral Video to convey a new meaning or message.”
Fast forward to today, where the court ruled in favor of Netflix, with Holmes defending that the docuseries’ “use of the Funeral Video clips is classic documentary-style borrowing.”
The chief judge added: “The difference between the purposes animating Defendants’ use of the excerpted material and Mr. Sepi’s use of the Funeral Video is significant.”
The panel also noted that there was “no indication that Defendants gained materially from the commercial exploitation of the copyrighted material itself.”
A representative for Netflix did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
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