Slashdot Mirror
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.
Glad to see a copyright troll getting what it deserves.
Ironically the photographer found out when LCS threatened her with copyright infringement unless she paid $120 after she used one of her own photos. Getty does not acknowledge their relationship with LCS however LCS uses the same address as Getty's corporate office. I would suspect LCS is their enforcement subsidiary so that they don't get negative press.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
Look up public domain images.
Pick some you like.
Use them.
Get threatening letters from Getty for using them.
How the FUCK does that not hurt the average person who just wanted to use a few free images?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
As someone who has been on the wrong end of a letter from Getty's lawyers concerning a set of images which were bought (on a CD) with the impression that they were already properly licensed, I hope she wins every fucking penny.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
151. GettyÃââs violations of 17 U.S.C. ÃÂ 1202 entitle Ms. Highsmith to recover, among
other things, and if she so elects as provided in 17 U.S.C. à1203(c)(3)(B), ÃâÅ"an award of
statutory damages for each violation of section 1202 in the sum of not less than $2,500 or more
than $25,000.ÃâÂ
152. When Getty is found to have committed one violation of 17 U.S.C. ÃÂ 1202 for
each of the 18,755 results of a search for ÃâÅ"Carol M. HighsmithÃâ on GettyÃââs website, Ms.
Highsmith would be entitled to recover, among other things, and if she so elects, aggregate
statutory damages against Getty of not less than forty-six million, eight hundred eighty-seven
thousand five hundred dollars ($46,887,500) and not more than four hundred sixty-eight
million, eight hundred seventy-five thousand dollars ($468,875,000).
153. Additionally, because Getty has already had a final judgment entered against it in
the past three years in the Morel v. Getty case, the Court may treble the statutory damages in
this case.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
The music industry set the bar at $22,500 per violation ($675,000 for 30 works) for an individual violating copyright without a profit motive. $1 billion for 18,000 works is only $55,555 per violation, which is relative to the Tenenbaum case is not unreasonable when you consider this is commercial copyright violation. Her lawyers are actually being nice by "only" asking for $1 billion. Copyright law allows her to sue for up to $150,000 per violation, which would be a cool $2.7 billion.
In other words, if she gets less than $22,500 * 18,000 = $405 million out of this, there's been a gross miscarriage of justice either in her case or the Tenenbaum cause. Unlike filesharing, what Getty Images did is precisely the sort of thing copyright law was made to prohibit - profiting off the work of others.
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.
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.