Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.” (...)
But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions. (...)
The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.
Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set. (...)
Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos.
In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry.
So, who influenced whom?
In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.
“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”
Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming. (...)
Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”
Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.
Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.
They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”
The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational. (...)
Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming. (...)
Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”
Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.
Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.
They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”
The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational. (...)
Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work. (...)
“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains. (...)
Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.
“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.
“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”
Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.
“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.
“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”
by Mia Sato, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle[ed. Interesting legals, inane profession, obnoxious Amazon incentives. See also: This Ocean Wave Has Rights (legal protection for nature - Nautilus). ]
