01 Apr Ice Cube Sues Trading App Robinhood For Using His Likeness Without Consent

Ice Cube sues public stock trading app Robinhood for using his likeness without his consent.

Source: Jeff Kravitz / Getty

Ice Cube has been rather quiet since his contract with Black America, which brought tons of backlash his way–even with all the people trying to claim he was doing it to help our people. Still, maybe next time, it would be wise to see who wins the election around the corner before making such a bold move.

The trading app Robinhood knows a thing or two about backlash after their halting of trading Gamestop stock put them right in the public hot seat. As luck would have it, Ice Cube and Robinhood’s paths are now crossing in an odd way. According to TMZ, Ice Cube is suing Robinhood for using his face to plug their services without his permission.

The rapper just filed suit against the financial services company — which a lot of people use to buy and trade stocks — for allegedly using a photo of him in an ad featured in their news service, Robinhood Snacks, just this past month.

According to the docs, obtained by TMZ, Cube claims Robinhood took an image of him from another project he’d worked on … and slapped it into a newsletter update talking about stock/market corrections — and captioned it with a riff on a famous lyric from one of his songs.

Since TMZ first broke the story, Cube’s lawyers have said they asked Robinhood to take it down and they refused. Robinhood claimed that the image was licensed. If you work with newsletters, WordPress, or social media, you know you can use Getty and their images for editorial purposes, which is what Robinhood did. The image was probably built into whatever mailing list they use.

Unfortunately, it looks like Ice Cube and his legal team aren’t aware of this, but either way, it will be fun to see play out.