The way this story emerged has an almost cinematic quality. Somewhere in suburban America, a fan enters a big-box electronics store, stops, and looks at a row of stacked TV cartons. Dua Lipa is looking back at the cardboard. The real box you would carry to your car, not an advertisement or a screen demo loop. The pictures were already making the rounds on the internet by June of last year, with half-joking captions referring to it as the “Dua Lipa TV Box.” It appears that no one bothered to find out if she was aware of it.
She didn’t. At least that’s what her attorneys are now telling a federal court in California, where she sued Samsung for $15 million last Friday. According to the complaint, the company used what appeared to be a celebrity endorsement to slap her face on retail packaging without her consent. She is the owner of the aforementioned photo, which was taken backstage during her 2024 Austin City Limits Festival appearance. Because their entire brand machinery depends on knowing exactly where their face resides in the world, artists take great care to protect this kind of image.
Samsung’s perspective is perhaps more intriguing and more nuanced. The business maintains that it did not commission anything dubious or take the picture from the internet. It claimed that the picture originated from a third-party content partner connected to Samsung TV. Additionally, Samsung claims that it was explicitly assured that permission had been obtained for the company’s free streaming service. Importantly, this also applies to the retail boxes. The court will have to decide whether that assurance truly existed in any meaningful contractual sense. The chain of permissions may have broken at some point, as these situations frequently do when business partners have a bit too much faith in one another.
Even though $15 million is by no means insignificant, there are other factors that make this lawsuit intriguing. It’s the surrounding cultural texture. Brand work is nothing new to Lipa. She has worked on campaigns for Puma, Versace, Apple, Porsche, and most recently, Nespresso. She has spent years developing her commercial value, deal by deal and photo shoot by photo shoot. In contrast to lawyers, her team does not exaggerate when they claim that Samsung’s packaging “dilutes” her brand. They are defending an economy of association that has been carefully calibrated.
The social media responses mentioned in the document provide a brief narrative of their own. Because Dua is on the TV, one fan wrote that they would purchase it.”If you need anything selling, just put a picture of Dua Lipa on it,” someone else joked. Funny lines, but devastating evidence in a court of law. They point to precisely the kind of consumer confusion that the law pertaining to publicity rights was intended to resolve.
Here, it’s difficult to ignore the bigger pattern. Tech companies have become more daring when it comes to integrating celebrity content into their ecosystems, sometimes through collaborations and other times by assuming that no one will object. Lipa is resisting, and this won’t go away quietly given her resources and the standing of her team. According to Samsung, it is still amenable to a “constructive resolution.” No one knows yet whether that entails a more public reckoning or a quiet settlement. However, the boxes are available. They are currently on the docket of the courts.
