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Getty Sued For $1 Billion For Selling Publicly Donated Photos (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Online stock media library Getty Images is facing a $1 billion lawsuit from an American photographer for illegally selling copyright for thousands of photos. The Seattle-based company has been sued by documentary photographer Carol Highsmith for 'gross misuse', after it sold more than 18,000 of her photos despite having already donated them for public use. Highsmith's photos which were sold via Getty Images had been available for free via the Library of Congress. Getty has now been accused of selling unauthorized licenses of the images, not crediting the author, and for also sending threatening warnings and fines to those who had used the pictures without paying for the falsely imposed copyright.ArsTechnica has more details.
Not like anything will actually happen to them.
If you dig around a bit, you'll see that the artist did not make her photos public domain. She licensed them to the Library of Congress and gave a permissive license for anyone else to use them --- presumably including to sell them --- as long as users give notification that the these are the photographer's work. Nonetheless, she retains copyright. This is basically a BSD-style license. Getty is not only suing her for using her own copyrighted work, but is also not informing customers that they're her work, in violation of the license. She's suing to preserve the terms of her license.
Finding God in a Dog
Depends on the situation. From what I understand the OP bought a CD of images thinking that the purchase of said CD was a license. The OP then used the images. For the sake of argument, Getty owned the images and not the CD seller, Getty can sue the OP for infringement; however, they cannot sue for willful infringement as the OP in good faith believed he or she properly licensed the image. Any amount that Getty collected from the OP, the OP can then sue the CD seller. However all this takes time in court to resolve. A court however probably would not have fined the OP much and would have been okay with the OP merely removing the images. Again it may be a long legal hassle should Getty chose to pursue. Of course, Getty could be dicks about it the whole time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Getty now sells NASA on-orbit and other spaceflight images. These images are available through NASA, already bought and paid for with tax dollars. How Getty sells any of them at lower res than NASA supplies for $500+ is beyond comprehension.
Getty sent her a legal threat and demanded money for using her own photos on her own web site
That is the most delicious part of the entire story.
(Note also that this the online Getty image provider, not related to the Getty museum).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm more curious how Getty ended up thinking they owned the copyright on those images.
I assume it went something like this:
1) Scrape all freely shared images from LoC, assuming they're public domain.
2) Sell licenses to access their copy of the photos without mentioning that the images were freely available elsewhere
3) "Accidentally" include these images in the index they provide to their copyright enforcement arm.
Allegedly, the executives of Getty Images, Inc., who directed their subordinates to engage in criminal intimidation and racketeering based on false claims of copyright, are part of the criminal organization Getty Images, Inc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There's part of me that wonders if Getty had some automated process sending out these notices, or if there actually was someone signing off on them. If it's the latter, do they just send out so many of these claims that they didn't realize they were sending a legal threat to the owner of the pictures?
Of course "they" didn't realize they were sending a legal threat to the owner of the picture. The copyright information had been stripped from the images and this is a really large corporation with lots of employees. The only way the employee sending out the notices would have known she was the copyright holder if they were keeping records along with the images, and keeping such records along with the images would be a field day for some district attorney deciding to raid them.
You don't keep easily accessible records for systematically committed large-scale crimes, and without such records, the person sending the notices has no knowledge of the actual ownership and need not even be in knowledge of the criminal nature of the enterprise. Now in this case, it sounds like the respective records were marked with a "don't charge $x, justification: $y" entry that did not preclude charging other people. Which means that there is no viable process for Getty to stop generally charging for images they don't have rights on, or they don't care to use it.
And make no mistake, they will have a very hard time explaining why they shouldn't be hit with punitive damages based on statutory damages based on the actual violations they committed commercially and on a continuing basis even after getting notified.
The story does use a lot of funny wording which implies that they had been donated to the Public Domain, but if you click through to sources, it looks more like they were still under copyright, offered through some kind of free-as-in-beer license.
Looks like. It's really hard to see WTF the actual status is. What shitty, lazy reporting! But my guess is they're not PD, because the lawyer would have checked before he sued, that being the responsible and common sense thing to d-- why is everyone laughing at me?
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