A Kansas City photographer who built a portfolio of pictures depicting the estate where Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift is suing Realtor.com parent Move, Inc. for using her copyrighted photos without her permission.
Kansas City Chiefs star Kelce proposed to Swift in a garden at his estate in August in what may have been the most closely watched engagement of all time.
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In an attempt to capitalize on the hype around the engagement, Realtor.com published “impossible to find” photos inside Kelce’s home, photographer Brynn Burns wrote in a lawsuit filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in Western Missouri.
“Defendants knew these photographs belonged to Plaintiff,” Burns wrote in her complaint. “Defendants used and published these photographs without Plaintiff’s permission to drive millions of people to Defendants’ profitable website, Realtor.com, thinking it would be better (and cheaper) to ‘beg forgiveness’ rather than to have sought Plaintiff’s permission.”
Burns named two defendants in the lawsuit: News Corp., which owns Realtor.com parent Move, Inc., and the National Association of Realtors. NAR licenses its brand and the Realtor URL to Move.
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An attorney for Burns told Inman Tuesday that the lawsuit targets NAR because “it appears that the two defendants jointly operate and control realtor.com and the corresponding Instagram page.”
Realtor.com declined to comment for the story, citing pending litigation.
An NAR spokesperson said the organization isn’t involved in editorial decisions made by Realtor.com.
According to the complaint, Realtor.com publishing Burns’ photographs of Kelce’s estate rendered them useless.
“Plaintiff is unable to sell or license the work in Jackson County, Missouri because Defendants have made the work available to the world for free via their piracy of the work,” Burns argued in the complaint.
Burns wrote that she took the photos in 2023, the same year the Chiefs won their second consecutive Super Bowl. She registered the photos with the United States Copyright Office in January 2024, she said.
However, according to the copyright office, Burns wrote in her copyright filing that she took the photos in September 2022, before Kelce and Swift began dating.
According to Zillow, the property was listed for sale for $6.9 million in September 2022. The price was lowered by nearly $1 million in May 2023.
Kelce bought the mansion in suburban Leawood, Kansas, in October 2023. Reports at the time said the 3-acre property and 17,000-square-foot mansion offered privacy as the nation remained fixated on his budding relationship with Swift.
Burns wrote in her complaint that Realtor.com licensed her photos in December 2023 for just over a year. That agreement had been expired for seven months when Kelce popped the question.
In the weeks before and after the engagement, Realtor.com, which both displays real estate listings and drives user engagement through its news arm, ran stories that displayed Burns’ photos of the estate.
One of those posts was titled “Inside Travis Kelce’s Luxe $6 Million Kansas City Mansion Where He Proposed to Taylor Swift ‘2 Weeks Ago.’”
The post included seven photos showing the inside and outside of Kelce’s mansion, infringing on Burns’ copyright, she wrote.
“The work has attracted potential customers to Defendants’ website, and Defendants have turned some of those persons into paying customers of Defendants’ real estate business,” Burns wrote. “Defendants have never paid Plaintiff for the Work, and never sought permission to use the Work.”
Burns is seeking unspecified damages to be determined at trial.
