The complaint says a backstage shot from the 2024 Austin City Limits Festival ended up on Crystal UHD packaging in retail and online channels worldwide, and that Samsung ignored her cease-and-desist requests.
Dua Lipa filed a $15 million federal lawsuit against Samsung Electronics on Friday, alleging that the company has been using a 2024 photograph of her on the packaging for its Crystal UHD televisions since 2025 without her permission and without any agreement to pay her for the use.
The image, according to the complaint, was taken backstage at the 2024 Austin City Limits Festival. It shows the singer in close-up, recognisable to the millions of fans who have made her one of the most photographed pop musicians of the decade.
Samsung began shipping the photograph on cardboard boxes for its Crystal UHD line in 2025 and continues to do so. The suit was filed in the Central District of California.
Lipa’s lawyers are seeking damages on three legal theories. Copyright infringement, on the basis that Samsung did not license the underlying image. Trademark infringement, on the basis that her name and likeness function as marks under California law.
Violation of her right of publicity, the California statute that protects a person’s commercial control over their own image. The right-of-publicity claim is the heart of the case.
California’s statute, codified in Civil Code Section 3344, awards minimum statutory damages of $750 per knowing unauthorised use, with actual and punitive damages also available.
Multiplied across the production run of a global television line, the arithmetic explains the $15 million figure.
The complaint frames Samsung’s behaviour in pointed terms. Lipa says she became aware of the image’s presence on the packaging in June 2025. Her team sent cease-and-desist requests. Samsung, the complaint alleges, refused to stop.
The infringing boxes “remain on the market to this day,” the filing states, with Samsung’s response described as “dismissive and callous.” One contemporaneous social-media quote captured in the filing makes the commercial logic of the alleged infringement explicit:
“I wasn’t even planning on buying a TV, but I saw the box, so I decided to get it.”
The two sides of the case are unusually clean. Samsung will need to demonstrate either that it had a licence to use the image, that the use falls under fair-use or news-reporting exceptions (a high bar for product packaging), or that the alleged use does not in fact identify Lipa with sufficient specificity to trigger publicity-rights protections.
None of those defences is obviously available based on the facts as presented in the complaint. The image is a recognisable backstage portrait of an identified person.
The use is unambiguously commercial. The packaging is in retail stores and online listings around the world.
Samsung has not yet responded publicly. The company is no stranger to high-stakes IP litigation. Its decade-long courtroom war with Apple over smartphone designs produced one of the largest jury verdicts in tech history.
Its advertising team has also navigated minefields before, including the small-print disclaimers that turned up in its Galaxy Z Flip Oscars ad. The current case is structurally simpler than either of those. It does not require the court to weigh the originality of an interface or the cleverness of a marketing slogan.
It requires the court to weigh whether the company used a famous person’s photograph on a product without permission. The answer, on the evidence the complaint sets out, looks like yes.
The case lands in a moment when the wider question of who controls a recognisable face has been getting more, rather than less, contested. the broader collapse of celebrity-likeness protection in the AI era has shifted the conversation, with synthetic versions of famous voices and likenesses now in routine commercial use.
Lipa’s complaint is in some ways a reminder that the older form of the problem (a real photograph used without permission) has not gone away just because the newer form (a synthetic likeness generated without permission) has captured most of the headlines.
Both depend on the same legal principle, that a person owns the commercial use of their own image, and both stress-test the same gap between how quickly the technology has moved and how slowly licensing practice has adapted to it.
For Samsung, the immediate exposure is reputational as much as financial. $15 million is a small number against a company that posted an operating profit of above $33 billion last year.
The settlement value of cases like this is usually closer to the licensing fee Lipa would have charged in the first place, plus a premium reflecting the use already made and the cost of the litigation; the figure in the complaint is the negotiating ceiling, not the likely outcome.
The harder thing for Samsung to settle is the perception of carelessness. A company that ships Crystal UHD TVs to seventy-plus countries and runs CES launches in front of the global press cannot easily explain how a photograph of a major pop musician arrived on its packaging without a licence.
The plaintiff’s framing of dismissiveness and callousness will resonate with consumers who have themselves felt brushed off by large companies’ rights teams.
It also matters that Lipa, with the resources to litigate, has chosen to. Many of the people whose likenesses appear without permission on smaller-scale products do not have her access to a Los Angeles entertainment-law firm or the time to follow a federal case through to its conclusion.
The lawsuit, if it produces a settlement or a verdict in her favour, will function as a market signal for the kind of permissions practice that consumer-electronics companies should have in place for any high-profile image on packaging.
Samsung’s Oscars Galaxy Z Flip spot demonstrated how aggressively Samsung markets through cultural moments; the Lipa filing demonstrates the cost of taking shortcuts when doing so.
What happens next is procedural. Samsung will have an opportunity to respond to the complaint, likely with a motion either to dismiss specific claims or to compel arbitration.
The trademark claim is the most vulnerable on the pleading; the copyright claim depends on who took the photograph and what rights Lipa or her team holds in it.
The right-of-publicity claim is the one most likely to survive any early motion practice and the one most likely to drive settlement discussions.
California’s publicity statute is among the most plaintiff-friendly in the United States, and federal courts have consistently held that the use of a recognisable photograph on consumer packaging without authorisation triggers it.
The case will not be over quickly. Lawsuits of this shape generally take a year or more to reach summary judgment, and a settlement is usually the eventual outcome.
The interesting question is whether Samsung will treat this as a one-off licensing oversight and quietly settle, or as a category-defining moment in its product-marketing operations that requires a more systematic response.
The boxes are still on the shelves. The longer they stay there, the worse the company’s position gets.
Dua Lipa, for her part, has the easier of the two narratives to maintain. Her image was used without permission. Her demands were ignored. She is now in federal court.
Whatever the eventual settlement number, the legal posture is the kind of celebrity’s brand team usually considers a win on impact alone.
