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Third lawsuit filed over Fyre Festival footage in Netflix doc

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 5 September 2019

Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary is following in the footsteps of the event it documented by resulting in a flurry of litigation. Maybe someone will have to make a documentary about the making of the Fyre Festival documentary.

A third lawsuit has now been filed claiming that Netflix’s film used, without permission, footage shot by a festival-goer. Austin Mills says that he refused to license the footage when approached by the makers of the documentary, but that it was used nonetheless.

Mills also claims that his “impactful” footage is key to the film’s storytelling, adding that he captured other festival-goers “discovering the dire reality of the situation” and “the festival organiser addressing the distressed attendees”.

According to Law360, the lawsuit states that the makers of the Netflix production “knew they needed to obtain plaintiff’s permission to use his footage, going so far as to ask for a licence, but then without regard to plaintiff’s rights, used the footage without consent”.

“Ironically”, it goes on, “[the defendants] seem to have scammed plaintiff of his footage for use in their film about a major scam”.

Continuing down this line, the lawsuit heavily criticises Jerry Media, one of the producers of the documentary and also the social media agency behind the festival. The lawsuit claims that the whole film project is “little more than a media campaign to absolve some defendants of their complicity in [the original Fyre Festival] scam”.

Another similar lawsuit was filed last month, almost identical to one which resulted in an out-of-court settlement in June.