But the controversy from the original tattoo wasn’t the last of it. In THE HANGOVER PART II an exact copy of Tyson’s tattoo was featured on the face of actor Ed Helms as part of a humorous plot device. Whitmill was outraged, and claimed copyright over his tattoo. In 2011 he sued Warner, arguing that they had violated his exclusive right to authorize derivative works. Whitmill’s decision to sue stirred lingering resentments in Aotearoa/New Zealand around the tattoo’s cultural content: in response to the litigation, Maori politician Tau Henare tweeted that it was a “a bit rich” that Tyson’s tattooist was claiming someone had stolen the design, given that he had copied it from Maori without permission.
Alan Dershowitz, acting as Tyson’s counsel, filed an appeal urging error of law in the Court’s exclusion of evidence of the victim’s past sexual conduct (known as the Rape Shield Law; Dershowtiz alleged that Washington had “falsely accused one of her high school classmates of rape”), the exclusion of three potential defense witnesses, and the lack of jury instructions on honest and reasonable mistake of fact. The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled against Tyson in a 2–1 vote. The Indiana Supreme Court let the lower court opinion stand due to a 2–2 split in its review. The tie vote was due to the fact that the Chief Justice, Randall T. Shepard, recused himself from the case. The Chief Justice later revealed he did so because of a heated argument between his wife and Dershowitz at a Yale Law School reunion concerning the case. On March 26, 1992, Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison along with four years of probation. He was assigned to the Indiana Youth Center (now the Plainfield Correctional Facility) in April 1992, and he was released in March 1995 after serving less than three years of the sentence. He left with prison tattoos of tennis player Arthur Ashe and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong; Tyson also dates his tattoo of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara to this time.
The American former boxer Mike Tyson has four tattoos of note. Three—at least two of them prison tattoos —are portraits of men he respects: tennis player Arthur Ashe, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The fourth, a face tattoo influenced by the Māori style tā moko, was designed and inked by S. Victor Whitmill in 2003. Tyson associates it with the Māori being warriors and has called it his “warrior tattoo”, a name that has also been used in the news media.
Warner Bros. asserted about 16 defenses. They acknowledged that the tattoos were similar but denied that theirs was a copy. They further argued that “tattoos on the skin are not copyrightable”. They reasoned that a human body is a useful article under 17 U.S.C. § 101 and thus not copyrightable. The question of a tattoo’s copyrightability had never been determined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Arguments in the alternative included that Tyson, by allowing them to use his likeness and not objecting to the plot device in The Hangover Part II, had given them an implied license, and that their why do boxers use boxing gloves of the tattoo constituted fair use as parody because it juxtaposed Tyson as “the epitome of male aggression” with the “milquetoast” Price. Scholar David Nimmer, participating an expert witness for Warner Bros., argued that treating tattoos as copyrightable would violate the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as a badge of slavery; Nimmer’s declaration was then excluded because it was a legal opinion.
“A little bit more practise . Zhang is a fellow silver medallist, he’s good fighter and hits hard. He’s an awkward style because he’s a southpaw and a powerful southpaw at that. I just couldn’t get away, I kept getting hit by his left hand. I’m disappointed. I’d like to apologise to all my fans and supporters. I’ll be back. My journey’s not over. This is just a hurdle I’ve tripped over. I’ll be back.
At age 35, Zhang wants something substantial soon, and he’d much rather be fighting someone higher up the totem pole. He admits to being “a little frustrated” with promoter RocNation about his relative anonymity at a time when the heavyweight division is hotter than it has been since Lennox Lewis’ retirement, with fighters like Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury poised to generate worldwide headlines and millions of dollars in purse money.
Now 77, it seems Scorsese would be the ideal man to tell the story of Tyson. Having directed Goodfellas and more recently, Wolf of Wall Street, this would be Scorsese’ first boxing move since Raging Bull.
Towards the end of this limited series from HULU, Mike Tyson tells us his story is “one of a kind”. Maybe so but this paint by numbers approach to the still living man is anything but. I could practically predict scenes beat for beat. Watching it’s relatively short episodes week to week didn’t help me to connect with the material. It’s biopic 101.