Harry and Meghan mess with the wrong Hollywood lawyer at the worst time

“It was a galling request,” says Joanna “Jo” Ardalan, 40, a partner at One LLP, a Beverly Hills-based boutique firm specializing in intellectual property and copyright law, which has represented Backgrid for over five years. So galling, says Ardalan, who is also an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School, that she spent a solid two hours crafting a response she hoped would “put them in their place.” Mission accomplished.

“Do they really think they can do that to businesses just trying to do their work?” she snapped.

To be clear, Backgrid hasn’t heard from Team Sussex since the response. And the photos from that night? Ardalan says “they don’t show anything remotely representing a near catastrophe or a two-hour chase through the crowded streets of Manhattan.”

But whether they realized it or not, the Sussexes did more than just flex their self-perceived muscle against the press, their perennial foe, when they sent the missive. They also became an inadvertent billboard for a much, much bigger issue causing serious concern in the creative orbits of Hollywood and beyond: the rights of photographers and other creators to ownership over their work.

Two days after Backgrid flipped Team Sussex lawyers the proverbial bird, the Supreme Court ruled that, in effect, Andy Warhol had appropriated a photo of Prince by celebrity shutterbug Lynn Goldsmith to create one of his iconic silkscreens. She sued when Warhol’s estate later licensed an image of it to Condé Nast for use in one of its magazines. In siding with Goldsmith, the justices ruled that Warhol’s artistic interpretation of the photo didn’t trump Goldsmith’s copyright in it, a decision that sent a palpable shiver down the spine of creative communities around the world. “It strikes at the heart of the way artists today have been raised to make and understand art,” wrote the Brooklyn Museum in an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court.

But for Ardalan, who also represents Backgrid in a suit against Twitter for not policing copyrighted photos on its platform, it was a validation of sorts, a win for much-maligned celebrity photographers. “We want to incentivize creators, like photographers. If people like Andy Warhol are free to create derivative works for competing uses, that undermines the photographers’ incentive to create in the first place,” she explained.

For Harry and Meghan, the case underscores the bald absurdity of not just their demand, but their attempts to rewrite the well-established quid pro quo between paparazzi and stars: we give you attention you want, and you let us pay our rent with the fruits of that labor. It also raised uncomfortable questions about the hypocrisy of their position if one is to believe the likes of Megyn Kelly and Piers Morgan, who say Markle alerts photographers when she wants to be snapped. A case of biting the hand that feeds you?

“I don’t know anything about that,” Ardalan said.