Many individuals and corporations don't think twice before reusing photos they find on the Internet and social media, despite the fact that doing so puts them in danger of being sued. — 123rf.com
The photo of that beautiful sunrise you found through a Google search? It would look great on your Airbnb website to show guests how nice the beaches can be in the morning.
Just copy and paste it next to the picture of that charming beachfront cottage you’re renting out.
Perfect – until you hear from a lawyer representing the owner of that photo.
The letter says you committed an act of copyright infringement and you need to cough up a good chunk of cash if you want to avoid having to defend yourself in court.
You’ve just learned that the free-wheeling Internet isn’t so free.
ALSO READ: Apple defeats copyright lawsuit over racially diverse emoji
A phone call alerted John Abdelsayed, a real estate agent with the West Palm Beach-based Trends Realty USA Corp, that he was being accused of illegally using a photo as a profile image of a community that included a property he was trying to sell.
“At first I thought it was one of those IRS (Internal Revenue Service) scams – you know, ‘send money now or someone will be at your house to arrest you’.
“I had used a photo from MLS (Multiple Listing Service) but thought I was allowed. Then I got a demand letter and thought it was a scam.
“It wasn’t until they filed a suit that I realised they were serious,” he said.
The letter demanded US$30,000 (RM133,700) to avoid litigation, Abdelsayed said.
The lawsuit, on behalf of Palm Beach County-based Affordable Aerial Photography, sought up to US$150,000 (RM668,500), but rulings in the case since then make that outcome unlikely.
Content and controversy
Twenty years after the music-file-trading service Napster alerted content providers to the ease and volume of copyright infringement activity online, Internet users are still helping themselves to content they don’t own and paying thousands of dollars when they get caught.
And as the infringement continues, it has resulted in a “slow but steady” increase in the number of content owners, lawyers and paid services that look for violators and target them, says Mitch Stoltz, a staff lawyer focusing on intellectual property at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation that advocates for free speech and privacy rights protections online.
Even posting a photo you don’t own on a social media site such as Facebook or Instagram can make you a target if your page promotes a business or if you are a recognisable brand.
NBA star LeBron James and NFL quarterback DeShawn Watson learned this when they were sued for posting in-game images of themselves taken by freelance sports photographers on their own social media pages. Both athletes chose to settle the claims.
And in the new copyright frontier, photographers are suing companies who use their social media posts containing copyrighted content and embed them on websites – something that social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram make easy to do.Price to pay
Most enforcement activity takes one of two forms, Stoltz says.
“There are lawsuits trying to uphold people’s rights to their creative work, and there are suits basically trying to make money off of threats to litigate,” he said.
Which is which depends on the content owner and the law firms pursuing claims, he said.
But one thing is certain: If you get a letter demanding payment to avoid litigation, you’re going to pay. You’ll either likely have to pay to avoid a lawsuit, or you’ll pay a lawyer to defend yourself.
In the US District Court in South Florida, a handful of businesses have been showing up again and again as plaintiffs in copyright infringement suits.
One is Strike 3 Holdings, a Delaware-based firm that sues people who use file-sharing websites to download adult movies.
The company files suit against defendants based only on their IP addresses, then subpoenas Internet service providers for the names of customers using those IP addresses.
Three are photography studios. Affordable Aerial Photography, which takes photos of high-end South Florida homes for real estate listings, has filed 134 lawsuits since 2014, including 89 in the Southern District of Florida dating to 2020.
Its targets are mostly real estate agencies but include insurers, a wealth management group, resorts and web-design firms.
Another is Prepared Food Photos, a Lake Worth company that sells subscriptions for access to hundreds of stock photos of popular restaurant-style dishes, meats, seafood and produce.
The studio has sued 58 businesses, including 22 in South Florida, ranging from produce wholesalers, meat suppliers, food delivery services and small restaurants.
Blaine Harrington, a Denver-based travel photographer with more than 45 years of experience working for national magazines, book publishers, non-profits and large corporations, has filed more than 100 infringement suits since 2017, including 21 against a variety of defendants, including hotels, travel agencies, yacht brokers, tourist attractions, and even Monroe County over a photo taken in the Florida Keys.
Compensation for creators
Daniel DeSouza, a Coral Springs-based attorney and partner in the firm CopyCat Legal PLLC that represents the three photography businesses, says his clients deserve to be compensated for commercial use of their work.
Failure to protect their content, he says, could lead future infringers to claim that the creator must not care if their work is used for free.
“If you have an aggressive client, often they will be called a copyright troll and overly aggressive,” he said.
“Taking the opposite approach can be construed as allowing infringement. I’ve had too many suits where the defence is, ‘This person didn’t protect his copyright’.”
Harrington has taken 500,000 images in over 80 countries and about 50,000 are posted on his website, he says.
Because he has disabled the ability to directly download his images from his website, infringers can only obtain them by taking low-resolution screenshots or finding them on other websites.
Harrington’s website is plastered with copyright notices. One says that no photos on the site “are within the public domain”.
And yet a reverse image search of one of Harrington’s photos – a pastoral view of a road winding through Kentucky horse country – turns up 624 uses across 16 pages of Google search results.
On the Wikimedia Commons site, where creators post images for royalty- free use, the photo is credited as owned by someone else and labelled as freely available for any use. Users who rely on that assurance risk an infringement suit.
DeSouza says prolific content providers such as Harrington must rely on third parties, including law firms that practice copyright infringement law, to protect their rights.
“He has 500,000 photos,” DeSouza said. “It would take this guy 85 years to track all infringements.”
In an interview, Harrington said he has been portrayed by opposing lawyers as a copyright troll “who puts this material out on the Internet solely for the purpose of hooking infringers”.
He takes issue with such accusations, as a sought-after professional who has been shooting high-quality photographs since the 1970s for magazines such as Time, Forbes, National Geographic and many others.
In addition to nearly five decades of experience, he has invested about US$100,000 (RM445,700) in camera equipment, computers, monitors, hard drives, software and a drone.
Then there are outlays for travel, hotels, renting helicopters or hot air balloons, and liability insurance.
“This is my point of view,” he said.
“I took these pictures and I deserve to be paid. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who can’t be bothered to find out how to licence a photo.”
Some content creators pay companies, such as TinEye, to constantly search the Internet for infringing uses.
There are also law firms that perform searches, though DeSouza says his firm is not among them and relies on creators to alert the firm to potential claims.
And there are content owners who pursue claims more aggressively than others, DeSouza says.
Most law firms in the United States take copyright infringement cases on contingency – meaning they only get paid when they win in court or convince targets to settle – because content owners typically can’t afford to pay lawyers’ hourly fees upfront, he says.
That results-dependent arrangement is why targeted infringers almost always end up paying something.
For every lawsuit that’s actually filed, there are an untold number of targets who pay up to make the threat go away, Stoltz said.
Typically, content owners resort to lawsuits when accused infringers ignore their initial communications, DeSouza and Harrington said.
“You reach a point in negotiations in trying to obtain a settlement where the infringer either is not acknowledging the case or is not being serious about trying to resolve the matter,” Harrington said.
Then “it becomes necessary to file suit. In the majority of these cases, if not all of them, this has led to settlements”.
Not going away
Experts urge those who receive demand letters to address the matter right away, by negotiating a settlement with the rights owner or hiring a lawyer to determine the most prudent path forward.
The worst thing people do is ignore letters, emails or phone calls.
The claims are not going away, and the price to settle will only escalate if ignored, Florida realtors warned in a 2014 story in its trade magazine.
Defendants who fail to respond to federal lawsuits can find themselves on the losing end of default judgments that typically cost US$50,000 (RM222,350) in the US, DeSouza said.
Griffin C. Klema, a Tampa-area attorney who defends targets of lawsuits and demand letters from DeSouza’s clients and others, urges targets to hire a defence lawyer as soon as possible.
They know how to minimise damage or possibly even beat infringement charges, he said.
One strategy involves convincing a judge that a claim should be settled for “actual damages”, “statutory damages” or profits of the infringer, he said.
Typically, lawyers for content owners will automatically seek statutory damages, which are set by federal law at US$750 to US$30,000 (RM3,350 to RM133,700) per infringement if found not to be wilful, and up to US$150,000 if wilful.
To be entitled to statutory damages, the content owner must prove that the infringement was committed after the work was registered with the US Copyright Office.
If the work wasn’t registered before the infringement, lawyers’ fees cannot be awarded and owners are limited to seeking “actual damages”.
As the term implies, that refers to the actual amount of money the content owner lost when the infringer failed to hire them or licence their work.
This can be much less, particularly if the defendant can prove that the damages should equal the content owner’s lost revenue.
The profits that the infringer made by using the copyrighted work can also be awarded if they exceed the actual damages.
Fighting back
John Abdelsayed says he decided to fight the claim levelled against him by Affordable Aerial Photography not only because he could not afford to pay its US$30,000 demand but also because “I don’t believe I owe it to them”.
“I don’t believe I took anyone’s photo. Anything I’ve done, I did with a licence,” he said.
Klema has responded to the firm Affordable Aerial Photography’s claim with a number of defences, including by proving that the studio is not entitled to statutory damages and lawyers’ fees because it did not register the photo with the US Copyright Office before Abdelsayed posted it on his site.
Now, the dispute is focused on whether the photo that Abdelsayed used is covered by the registration at all.
The photo he downloaded from the MLS site, the two sides agree, was an edited version of the original registered one.
The photographer changed it by adding five bougainvilleas, adjusting the tilt and cropping the image. He’s arguing that the “derivative” work is covered by the same registration, but DeSouza acknowledged his client could lose the case if the judge does not agree.
Klema and Abdelsayed hope the judge will rule in their favour and, if not, limit any award to an amount that’s “very, very small”, Klema said.
DeSouza says it’s rare for an infringement case to advance so far. The vast majority of potential defendants agree to settle before any lawsuit is filed.
Embedding is endangered
One way that websites and portals have been able to display copyrighted content they are not licensed to use while avoiding infringement claims is by embedding photographers’ social media posts with the content onto their sites, said Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram encourage such usage by providing embed codes, and the website owners rely on a 2007 California federal court ruling that embedded posts do not violate copyrights because their content is stored on the social media platforms.
But a handful of content owners are challenging these uses, arguing that websites, including news site publishers, are infringing when they fail to licence content in embedded posts.
A 2018 ruling in the Southern District of New York affirmed a photographer’s claim that Breitbart News violated its copyright by embedding a Twitter post with the photographer’s image of quarterback Tom Brady. Several media companies have since reached settlements with the photographer.
And in California, a pair of photographers are appealing a 2021 federal judge’s dismissal of their claim that third-party websites violate their copyrights – and that Instagram is liable for secondary infringement – when embedding Instagram posts displaying their photos and videos.
They claim that the 2007 ruling holding website owners harmless for embedded posts with copyrighted content is now “outmoded and impractical”, according to the website PetaPixel.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that the photographers’ argument “is not what the law should be”, Stoltz said, adding, “but some courts feel otherwise”.
New case law requiring website owners to licence images in embedded social media posts could dramatically alter the options available to traditional news sites and untold numbers of sites that post stories stringing together Tweets, TikTok videos and posts from Instagram and Facebook.
“Embedding is the new legal frontier,” Stoltz said. – South Florida Sun-Sentinel/Tribune News Service
