Photographer Files $1B Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images

[Tim Colling]

I know a lot of us here do dev work as well as SEO work.

This is potentially very big news.

Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images

In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge.

Now, Highsmith has filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against both Alamy and Getty for “gross misuse” of 18,755 of her photographs.

If this turns out to be true, this could be interstate fraud, a Federal crime. Amazing.

 

[James Watt]

Wow, that's big news. I work with a number of photographers, so this is especially relevant to me, I'll definitely be passing this one along. Thanks for the share Tim! I'm always happy to see the big corporations get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. It's disgusting to charge others for something an artist put out there for fair use.