Steinarsdottir v. Tripscout — Travel Brand Directly Liable for Reposting Influencer’s Photos Through Overseas Contractors, but Lost-Sales Damages Fail

Background

Asa Steinars is an Icelandic content creator with more than one million Instagram followers who earns a living by licensing her photographs and short videos of Iceland, working with brands and promoting tourism. Tripscout, a U.S. company, owns hundreds of travel-related social media accounts, which it uses to direct users to a hotel-booking platform it owns and earns commissions when users book. Tripscout runs the accounts through a few U.S. employees and a network of overseas contractors, many in Egypt, and provides them with a step-by-step playbook for finding content and asking creators for permission to repost it.

Beginning in 2017, when Steinars had about 47,000 followers, Tripscout’s accounts began republishing her content. She did not object and at times responded with a heart emoji to automated messages reporting a repost. In March 2021, after her following had grown to about 434,000, she told Tripscout that its use violated copyright law, demanded 54,000 euros for past use and said it had no permission going forward. Tripscout rebuffed the demand but took the works down, and her content reappeared on its pages at least eight more times, including twice after the lawsuit began, even though Tripscout had placed her on an internal “red flag” list meant to stop staff from contacting her or posting her work.

Steinars sued in 2023, alleging that Tripscout infringed 41 registered works on 53 occasions. Tripscout’s counterclaims were dismissed earlier, and the court sanctioned both sides for failing to preserve evidence, with the jury to be allowed to consider the spoliation at trial. Both parties then moved for summary judgment. Steinars sought partial summary judgment on liability for every infringement except No. 9, which appeared on an Instagram account (@antarcticaexplores) whose ownership is disputed. Tripscout sought summary judgment on all claims and on two affirmative defenses.

The Court’s Holding

Judge Christopher R. Cooper granted both motions in part and denied them in part.

Domestic infringement. The Copyright Act does not apply outside the United States, and the plaintiff bears the burden of showing a domestic violation. Following the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Spanski Enterprises v. Telewizja Polska and its later decision in IMAPizza, the court asked where the relevant exclusive right was violated. Steinars’ theory is that Tripscout violated her public display right, and a work is displayed wherever it is shown to the public. The works appeared on screens in the United States, and the largest share of Tripscout’s Instagram audience is in the United States, so a jury could find that Tripscout targeted American users. That is more than the mere online accessibility that courts say is insufficient. It does not matter that overseas contractors pressed “post,” because the infringement culminated in the United States, and the court said Tripscout cannot avoid the Copyright Act by offshoring part of its production process.

Ownership of valid copyrights. Timely registration certificates were prima facie evidence of validity. Tripscout argued that Steinars’ husband, who operated the camera for many works, was the true author, or alternatively that her company was the author under the work-for-hire doctrine. The court found no record support for either theory: Steinars controlled the subject, timing, angle, lighting and equipment, and Tripscout offered only speculation about her husband’s contributions. In any event, under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b) and Unicolors v. H&M, a registration inaccuracy invalidates a certificate only if it was included knowingly, and Tripscout did not show that Steinars knew that listing herself as author was legally wrong. The work-for-hire argument failed because a salary from a company the creator owns and controls does not make her an employee.

Copying. For all but one infringement, Tripscout admitted it lifted the photos and videos from Steinars’ Instagram account and conceded it made no changes, so literal duplication established substantial similarity. As to Infringement No. 9, a jury must decide whether Tripscout owned the @antarcticaexplores account, based on the similar account name, identical template outreach messages signed by the same named employee and reposting of Steinars’ content.

Volitional conduct and agency. Like every circuit to address the issue, the court read a volitional-conduct or proximate-causation requirement into direct infringement, noting that the D.C. Circuit has not yet decided the question. But the requirement is aimed at passive actors, such as providers of automated user-controlled systems. Tripscout owned the accounts, chose to run them through employees and contractors, and gave them a playbook for sourcing and reposting content. Under agency principles, a principal is directly liable when an agent acts with actual authority, and the court found it undisputed that Tripscout gave its contractors authority to post on its behalf and delegated to them the duty to avoid posting unlicensed content. Steinars was therefore granted partial summary judgment on liability for Infringement Nos. 1-8 and 10-53.

Affirmative defenses. Instagram’s Terms of Use grant a license to Instagram, not to other users, and its policy allowing users to “send” public content through built-in sharing tools does not allow downloading and re-uploading works to other accounts. An implied license requires that the defendant requested the work, the creator delivered it and the creator intended the defendant to copy and distribute it, and mere acquiescence is not enough in this circuit. Whether heart emoji responses could show consent was a disputed fact, and permission for one account to repost one photograph did not give hundreds of other accounts a perpetual license. The statute of limitations defense failed because the challenged claims were either timely measured from the date Steinars moved for leave to amend or relate back to the original complaint, which attached all of the alleged infringements.

Damages. The court granted Tripscout summary judgment on Steinars’ lost-sales theory, because the record contained no evidence of reduced traffic, lost sales or lost revenue, and her follower count grew from 47,000 to 434,000 while Tripscout was posting her work. Her lost-license (hypothetical license) theory survives. She produced invoices from 2020 to 2025 showing brands paying thousands of euros and dollars to create, post and license her content, which gave a jury a sufficient objective basis for valuing a license without undue speculation. The invoices were not perfect comparators because some bundled production and posting services, but a jury can disaggregate those amounts. Tripscout’s complaint about disclosure of the theory under Rules 26 and 37 failed because any violation was harmless given its notice of the invoices and its questioning of Steinars about them. Steinars may also seek Tripscout’s profits from the infringement: Tripscout forfeited an argument against that remedy by raising it only in a single conclusory statement, the relevant profit is the gain attributable to the infringement and not company-wide profit, and Steinars need show only gross revenue, after which the defendant must prove deductions and other causes. A plausible causal link exists because Tripscout earns commissions from bookings made through its pages, and the court noted that Tripscout’s own deletion of the posts and their analytics prevented a more precise showing.

For statutory damages, only five of the 53 claims (Nos. 8, 9, 24, 52 and 53) qualify under 17 U.S.C. § 412 because the rest were infringed before registration. Willfulness is a jury question: Tripscout’s accounts infringed at least 52 times, eight infringements occurred after Steinars said she did not consent, including two after suit, and its staff kept contacting her despite the red flag designation. But the court declined to find the two post-suit infringements willful as a matter of law. Steinars may present actual damages and profits and statutory damages to the jury and choose between them before final judgment.

Key Takeaways

• A U.S. company that operates social media accounts aimed at an American audience can be directly liable for infringing posts made by overseas contractors; the display of the work to U.S. viewers is enough to make the infringement domestic.
• The volitional-conduct requirement protects passive platforms and automated systems, not businesses that run accounts through agents and tell them what content to source.
• Terms of service that license content to a platform do not give other users a license to download and repost the content, and a creator’s emoji reactions or earlier tolerance of reposting do not clearly establish an implied license.
• A copyright owner who cannot show lost sales may still recover on a hypothetical-license theory if she has objective evidence of what her work has been licensed for, even if prior deals are not exact comparators.
• Inaccuracies about authorship in a registration do not defeat the registration without proof that the applicant knew of them and knew the law.

Why It Matters

Content aggregators and brands that repost creators’ work from social media should note that outsourcing the posting does not shift legal responsibility away from the account owner, and that continuing to contact a creator who has refused a license can be used as evidence of willfulness. For creators, the ruling shows that records of past licensing deals can support damages even when traffic and sales losses cannot be proven, and that registering works before they are infringed determines whether statutory damages are available at all; here that left only five of 53 claims eligible.

The ruling is a summary judgment decision. The case remains for a jury to decide ownership of the disputed account, willfulness, and the amount of damages or profits, unless the parties settle. The public version of the opinion was filed on October 13, 2026; the opinion itself is dated September 25, 2026.