Roblox has landed itself in hot water with viral TikTok choreographer Kelley Heyer, as she's filed a lawsuit against the platform for using her dance without permission.
Heyer is behind last year's Apple dance—choregraphed to Charli XCX's song of the same name—which propelled both her and the tune to fame, even leading Heyer to perform the dance live at one of Charli XCX's concerts. If you're as online as I am, the trend was completely inescapable. Hell, even if you're not as online as I am, you've probably come across the song or the dance at least once since it went viral last summer.
If you've somehow not seen the dance or heard the song yet, here's Heyer performing the song on her TikTok:
@kelley.heyer ♬ Apple - Charli xcx
That's the dance that Heyer's legal team alleges was taken by Roblox without Heyer's consent, which was then released as part of Dress to Impress's Charlie XCX-themed Brat update back in August 2024.
According to Polygon, the two parties were in talks to license the dance out on August 12, but Roblox went ahead and released it before the two could come to "a signed agreement." Heyer went ahead and copyrighted her dance at the end of August, a couple of weeks after the Brat update had hit Dress to Impress.
The lawsuit alleges that Roblox has made around $123,000 from selling the emote between August and November last year, with legal representative Miki Anzai saying Heyer is "an independent creator who should be compensated fairly for her work."
It's worth noting that Heyer has successfully worked with a different game to turn her dance into an emote: Fortnite added the Bratty dance back in mid-December, with Heyer noting on TikTok that "the whole Fortnite team was really wonderful and super easy to work with."
She even hinted back then that Roblox hadn't exactly been kosher about its own emote release, saying in the same video that Fortnite was "the only videogame platform that has a signed contract to license the dance" from Heyer.
It's an interesting case, one which isn't all that unique in today's landscape as games like Fortnite continue to immortalise (and more importantly, monetise) pop culture internet moments. Fortnite itself is no stranger to dance-related lawsuits: The actor behind the iconic Fresh Prince of Bel Air 'Carlton Dance' Alfonso Ribeiro sued the developer, though he hit some copyright snags in the process.
Other viral dance creators like 2 Milly (the Milly Rock), Backpack Kid (the Floss, which Ninja painfully performed during a disastrous Times Square New Years Eve special) and Orange Shirt Kid (the Orange Justice) have all previously had lawsuits against Epic Games for using their dances without any formal agreement, though they were dropped with the purpose of refiling (it's unclear if that actually happened, though).
@kelley.heyer ♬ original sound - Kelley Heyer
Actor Donald Faison—whose moves to Bell Biv DeVoe's Poison on an episode of Scrubs is now more commonly known as the Fortnite default dance—never got around to filing a lawsuit, but has previously expressed his frustration with seeing his creations being used unpaid.
But now it's Roblox's turn to be in the firing line, and I hope that Heyer receives some kind of positive outcome from all this. It should hopefully help that she's filed for copyright, though we've already seen in previous cases that ownership around viral internet dances is rather shaky.
At the end of the day, I'm here for more creators being paid their worth. Be it music, dances, the written word, or any other creative outlet, people deserve to get their coin just as much as big corporations feel they deserve to profit off them.
