It has been more than six years since Netflix unleashed Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness on a captive quarantine audience, but the legal fallout from that documentary is still working its way through the courts. On April 30, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a published opinion in Whyte Monkee Productions, LLC v. Netflix, Inc., No. 22-6086, affirming summary judgment in Netflix’s favor and offering one of the more thorough judicial treatments of fair use in the documentary context in recent memory.
The case was brought by Timothy Sepi, a videographer who worked at Joe Exotic’s Gerald Wayne Interactive Zoological Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Sepi claimed copyright ownership in eight videos that appeared as clips in the Tiger King series. Seven were filmed during his employment at the Park, and the district court held they were works made for hire. The Tenth Circuit upheld that conclusion on procedural grounds — Sepi had raised an entirely new legal theory on appeal without having presented it to the district court and failed to argue for plain error review. That default ended the work-for-hire question without any engagement on the merits.
The more substantive portion of the opinion addresses the eighth video, a recording Sepi made of the funeral of Joe Exotic’s husband, Travis Maldonado. Sepi shot the video after leaving the Park and registered it for copyright following Tiger King’s release. Netflix and the production company, Royal Goode Productions, used approximately sixty-six seconds of the nearly twenty-four-minute funeral recording in Episode Five of the series.
The court analyzed all four statutory fair use factors under 17 U.S.C. § 107 and found each one favored the defendants. On the first factor — purpose and character of the use — the panel engaged in a careful reading of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, which the plaintiffs argued supported reversal. The Tenth Circuit concluded otherwise. Writing for the panel, Chief Judge Holmes explained that the Warhol framework requires weighing the degree of transformativeness against the degree of commerciality, and that an independent justification for copying — such as parody or direct commentary on the original — becomes especially relevant when a secondary use shares the same or similar purpose as the original. Here, the purposes could not have been more different. Sepi created the funeral video as a remembrance of a friend. Netflix used a brief excerpt to illustrate Joe Exotic’s showmanship and purported megalomania, weaving it together with critical commentary from the deceased’s mother played directly over footage of Exotic’s eulogy. That, the court found, was a genuinely transformative use justified in a broad sense by its advancement of copyright’s underlying goals — educating viewers, commenting on a notable personality, and providing social commentary on a world the series set out to document. The commercial nature of a Netflix streaming series did not alter the analysis, because the proper inquiry focuses on whether the defendant commercially exploited the copyrighted work itself, not the secondary work as a whole, and a sixty-six-second clip representing less than one percent of the entire series was not a vehicle for exploiting Sepi’s footage.
The second factor favored the defendants because the funeral video was factual in character — a static, tripod-mounted recording of an actual event that Sepi neither directed nor edited — and because Sepi had publicly livestreamed and posted the video to the Joe Exotic TV YouTube channel before Netflix ever used it, defeating any argument that the defendants interfered with his right of first publication.
On the third factor, the court found the amount used was quantitatively insubstantial and, applying a qualitative lens, concluded that the defendants had taken no more than was reasonably necessary to serve their purpose. The fourth factor likewise favored Netflix. Sepi failed to identify any protectible derivative market the defendants’ use might harm, had never licensed or commercially exploited any of his work, and did not seriously dispute that Tiger King was not a market substitute for a funeral recording.
The opinion is a significant contribution to fair use jurisprudence, particularly for documentary filmmakers. The court was careful to explain that documentaries are not categorically favored — the label alone carries no legal weight, and there is no presumption of fair use — but that they frequently qualify because they tend to serve the purposes enumerated in the statute’s preamble while using only limited snippets of archival material in pursuit of an objectively distinct purpose. The court also clarified that under Warhol, a secondary user need not comment on or directly target the original work to establish a transformative use. Targeting may supply an independent justification for copying when the two works share a similar purpose, but a broad justification rooted in genuine transformativeness and the advancement of copyright’s goals can stand without it.
For content creators, documentary filmmakers, and rights holders, this decision is worth reading carefully.
This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For questions about copyright, fair use, or intellectual property matters, contact The Russell Firm at russellfirmip.com.
