Drew Barrymore is facing a lawsuit over accusations that she used a copyrighted song in an Instagram post promoting her now-defunct Flower Beauty brand — the latest in a string of such cases over music in social media ads.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday (Jan. 15), targets the actress and talk show host over a March 2023 video featuring “You Make Me Happy (Acoustic)” by the German singer-songwriter My Sun and Stars — not a chart-topper, but a track that’s racked up 15.2 million spins on Spotify.
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Barrymore’s video was a promotion for a line of hair tools under her Flower brand, which the lawsuit claims was essentially just an advertisement using an uncleared soundtrack.
“Defendants have never been licensed to use the work at issue in this action for any purpose,” the suit reads. “Defendants copied, publicly performed and distributed the Work synchronized to a video advertisement … without the plaintiff’s permission.”
Filed by a company called Instnct Gmbh that claims to own the rights to the underlying song, the case is the latest in a flood of recent lawsuits over the use of copyrighted music in promotional videos on social media. Brands have been repeatedly sued over such posts in recent years, with cases targeting Chili’s, Marriott, NBA teams, Crumbl and many others.
Instagram and TikTok provide users with huge libraries of fully licensed songs to play over their videos, but the platforms’ terms of use typically state that those tracks are strictly for personal use and cannot be used for commercial videos. That kind of content requires a separate “sync” license, just like any conventional advertisement on TV.
That distinction has ensnared many companies in litigation, but INSTNCT claims the case against Barrymore is more straightforward. It says that “You Make Me Happy” was never licensed to social platforms and is “not contained in any music libraries licensed to Meta, TikTok, or other social networks.”
A spokesman for Barrymore did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday (Jan. 16).
