Asa Steinars is an Icelandic content creator. Her Instagram account has more than 1.5 million followers, making her the 6th most followed Icelander on Instagram (Laufey is first, and Björk is third). Videos of Steinars kayaking among icebergs, zip-lining over glaciers, and bathing in hot springs would make anyone with a ❤️ beat want to visit the Land of Fire and Ice. Working closely with her husband Leo (who is often behind the camera or operating drones that take dramatic aerial footage), Steinars licenses content to third parties, does brand collabs, and earns commissions on tours and hotels booked through links on her page. She pours her ❤️ and soul into it.
Defendant Tripscout promotes tourism through a large network of social media accounts. Tripscout also owns @hotel, a booking platform linked from the bios of its travel accounts, and it earns a commission when users book through it. Tripscout is, as the court put it, “always on the hunt for captivating travel-related content to post on its pages, hoping to convert increased user traffic into more bookings and, in turn, more revenue.” Everybody’s got a hungry ❤️.
On paper, Steinars and Tripscout would appear to be a love match (swipe right!), and for a while, they were. Tripscout’s accounts started reposting Steinars’s content in 2017, when she had about 47,000 followers. She didn’t object. On the contrary, when an automated direct message told her a Tripscout account had reposted her work, she sometimes replied with a heart emoji. ❤️ Once she even commented on a repost with three hearts. ❤️❤️❤️
As her follower count grew, Steinars had a change of ❤️, and she told Tripscout that the free ride was over. Claiming that Tripscout’s unauthorized use of her work violated U.S. copyright law, she demanded €54,000 for past use. Tripscout didn’t think her claim would hold up in court, but it removed her content anyway. Eventually, though, her content reappeared on some of Tripscout’s channels. How that happened is not clear; it may have been Tripscout’s contractors in Egypt who were responsible. (The ❤️ wants what the ❤️ wants.)
Steinars sued. After discovery, the parties cross-moved for summary judgment, which Judge Christopher R. Cooper (D.D.C.) granted in part and denied in part. I’m going to cherry-pick a few interesting issues from Judge Cooper’s opinion.
Did the Infringement Happen in Egypt?
Tripscout argued that since its contractors in Egypt had posted Steinars’s images online, the infringing conduct happened in Egypt, beyond the reach of U.S. copyright law. The court disagreed.
Under D.C. Circuit precedent, U.S. copyright law applies so long as “conduct relevant to the statute’s focus occurred in the United States.” The Copyright Act’s “focus” is protecting the exclusive rights in § 106, and the type of conduct that must occur in the U.S. depends on which right is violated. For the public display right – the “❤️ of this suit” (the court’s words) – Steinars had to show that her works were “displayed” or “shown” to the public in the United States. On that preliminary question, the answer was plainly yes.
However, mere online accessibility isn’t enough. If it were, it would render the extraterritoriality limits of the Copyright Act meaningless, since nearly everything posted online can be viewed in the United States. Precisely for this reason, courts require a “plus” factor beyond accessibility, which can be satisfied if the foreign acts were “intended to, and do, have an effect within the United States.” That was the case here: the largest share of Tripscout’s Instagram audience is in the United States, so a jury could find that Tripscout targeted American users (and their wallets). In other words, even if the infringement began in Egypt when Tripscout’s contractors uploaded the images, it culminated in the U.S.
Does Steinars Own the Copyright in the Images?
Steinars secured registrations for the allegedly infringed works. Tripscout argued that the registrations were invalid because, among other reasons, Steinars had incorrectly identified herself as the sole author of the works when, in fact, Leo was the author (or perhaps a co-author). Tripscout pointed out that, in most of the works, Steinars appears on camera, and it was Leo who had captured the images. If Leo pressed the shutter (for stills) or record button (for video), Tripscout argued, then Leo must be the author. (See this post, one of my all-time favorites, about the complexities of copyright ownership for photographs.)
The court was not convinced. Tripscout’s focus on Leo’s button-pushing “ignored the creative control Steinars insists she always exercised.” The record supported that Steinars was solely responsible for creative and final editing decisions. She chose the subject matter, timing, angle, lighting, perspective, lens, and equipment. Leo’s own declaration described his role as “limited” to “handling camera and drone equipment ... at [his] wife’s direction.” Tripscout argued that Leo must have contributed creatively in many ways, yet it provided no evidence in support, and “speculation is not enough to survive summary judgment.”
Moreover, the court found that even if Leo were a co-author, listing Steinars as sole author would not invalidate the registrations. Under § 411(b)(1), a certificate remains valid despite inaccuracies unless the applicant included the inaccurate information knowing it was inaccurate, and the Register would have refused registration had it known. See Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P. (“Lack of knowledge of either fact or law can excuse an inaccuracy in a copyright registration.”) Steinars obviously knew Leo was holding the camera. But knowing that fact “is not the same as knowing that naming herself as the author for those works was legally inaccurate.” Tripscout didn’t argue that she knew her sole-authorship claim was legally doubtful (assuming arguendo it was), and it pointed to no evidence that she did. That left only “metaphysical doubt,” which isn’t enough.
Was the Use Licensed?
The last issue I want to cover – and the most interesting – is whether Tripscout had a valid license to use the images.
First, Tripscout argued that Instagram’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy gave it an express license to copy Steinars’s posts. The court had already rejected this at the motion to dismiss stage, and it did so again on summary judgment.
Instagram’s Terms state that:
“When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).”
“There is a key difference between these two ways of sharing content. When a user shares public posts via direct messages, stories, or links, she shares the original post by the creator from the creator's account. By contrast, when a user copies and reposts a creator's content, she creates a new post on her own account…. The Court thus suspects that Instagram would have been clear if it wanted to grant all users the right to copy any public post. But it used the more limited language of ‘send’ instead.”
Second, the court rejected the argument that Steinars granted an implied license to Tripscout to use the content. In the D.C. Circuit, to prove an implied license, Tripscout must show that (1) it requested the creation of a work, (2) Steinars made and delivered that work to it, and (3) Steinars intended it to copy and distribute the work. This test is very narrow and envisions a commissioned work. Tripscout didn’t try to satisfy these elements, and it couldn’t have: it never asked Steinars to create anything.
Undeterred, Tripscout tried a different tack. Relying on precedent from other circuits, it argued that a license can be implied from conduct, including silence, even when the D.C. Circuit’s narrow test isn’t met. In its view, Steinars’s friendly engagement – such as replying with ❤️ instead of objecting – showed that she had impliedly licensed the use of her imagery
The court wasn’t persuaded. In the D.C. Circuit, “mere acquiescence ... is insufficient to create an implied license,” so Tripscout’s silence-based theory failed. And even if the court had been willing to take the bait and look to the law of other circuits, the ❤️s didn’t get Tripscout there either. Steinars testified that she did not understand her ❤️ reactions in DM exchanges as granting a license, creating a factual dispute over what those reactions actually meant. The two DMs in which she supposedly authorized the sharing of her content were no more helpful: they involved accounts that either were not at issue in the case or were not owned by Tripscout at the relevant time. More fundamentally, even if Steinars had consented to some reposting, “permitting one account to repost one photograph on one occasion does not give Tripscout’s hundreds of other accounts a perpetual license to republish Steinars’ content with impunity.”
The Rest and Damages Too
The court’s opinion addressed a number of other issues, including whether Tripscout could be liable for infringement committed by the independent contractors it hired to operate its social-media accounts (it could); whether the statute of limitations barred the claims (it didn’t); and whether Tripscout owned or operated another account on which one of Steinars’s works appeared (a jury will have to decide).
Finally, a few words about damages. Although the court ruled in Steinars’s favor on a number of questions concerning liability, Tripscout succeeded in narrowing her path to a big payout. The court ruled that Steinars could seek actual damages measured by the fair-market value of hypothetical licenses. (No surprise.) It also allowed her to seek Tripscout’s profits attributable to the infringement, although it cautioned that, given the many factors that draw users to a social media page, those profits may be “small to nonexistent” if the jury concludes that Steinars’s content played “a quite limited role, or even no role at all,” in generating revenue. The court rejected, however, Steinars’s attempt to recover profits she claimed she lost as a result of the infringement. Her theory was that Tripscout’s repostings diverted users from her page, thereby reducing the commission revenue she otherwise would have earned from hotel bookings, but she had no evidence to support it. Finally, of the 53 works at issue, only five were eligible for statutory damages.
This litigation has been going on for years. With liability largely resolved but Steinars's potential recovery narrowed, perhaps it's time for the parties to open their ❤️s to compromise and stop draggin’ this lawsuit around. In other words … time to settle.
Steinarsdottir v. Tripscout Inc., 2026 WL 3059291 (D.D.C. Oct. 13, 2026)
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