The Japanese toy and video game company that owns the Sylvanian Families brand has dropped a legal case against an Irish online content creator with 3.5 million followers.
Epoch Company took the case in recent months against Co Kildare-based Thea von Engelbrechten over her SylvanianDrama TikTok and Instagram posts which depicted soap-opera style dramatisations made using Sylvanian Families toy figures.
Ms Von Engelbrechten, who is in her early 20s, was sued by Epoch Company in the southern district of New York in April for copyright infringement and for allegedly causing irreparable damage to the Sylvanian Families brand.
In a notice lodged on Friday, however, the company said it was dismissing all claims, a move that would appear to indicate the parties had reached a settlement.
The details have not been disclosed. Epoch Company and Ms von Engelbrechten did not respond to contact from The Irish Times.
On Thursday Ms von Engelbrechten posted to her SylvanianDrama Instagram account for the first time since January.
In a statement she said: “Hi guys, on the 19th August I will be changing the name and picture of this account. I’m not sure what to change it to yet so please let me know if you have any suggestions.”
Since 2021 Ms von Engelbrechten has garnered a huge following online for her popular dramatisations featuring Sylvanian Families characters. She has 2.5 million followers on TikTok and one million on Instagram.
She began posting the videos from her childhood bedroom in Co Kildare during the pandemic.
In an interview last year with the Marketing Brew website, Ms von Engelbrechten said she began the SylvanianDrama TikTok account during the Covid pandemic.
“I was at home in my family home and we weren’t allowed to leave, so the SylvanianDrama account was kind of a boredom thing that I started,” she said.
Many of Ms von Engelbrechten’s videos reached viral status with some getting tens of millions of views.
Her popularity landed her major brand deals with companies such as Burberry, Netflix, Hilton Group and Marc Jacobs. These brand deals led Epoch Company to sue for copyright infringement as they claimed she was profiting from it.
Many of her storylines dealt with darker themes such as domestic abuse, drug and alcohol addiction and self-harm.
The second part of Epoch Company’s claim was that Ms von Engelbrechten’s videos had caused “irreparable injury” to the brand’s reputation.
Intellectual property law expert Professor Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University school of law said the reasons Epoch chose to sue Ms von Engelbrechten in New York were unclear.
“One of the possibilities was that Epoch hoped to get a judgment that they could enforce against US services like Instagram,” he said. “That’s just a hypothesis. However, we in America see a number of lawsuits from foreign entities suing other foreign defendants. And the reasons why they have chosen to sue in the US varies in every case.”
Prof Goldman said a notice of voluntary dismissal in such cases usually indicates a settlement, an outcome he would have expected in this instance.