The Major Battle Arrives: Famous Photographer Michael Grecco Sues Gawker Media

This had to happen somehow sooner or later... .

Back in summer 2004, after Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. wrote about "Fair Use for photos on the web and in blogs: a modest proposal to avoid a major battle", I had a general discussion with Jason on this topic, together with Bahar Gidwani of Index Stock ("Blogs, Photo and Copyright: "Hey, I drove that Porsche Boxster for two days, but frankly, I didn´t want to use it, I just wanted to make advertisement for Porsche!"").

Jason noted at that time here in this blog:

I think we are one of the responsible parties out there because we are researching the issue, talking to the people involved and making sure they are comfortable and even reaching out to people discussing the issue like you!

Nick Denton (founder and proprietor of Gawker Media, the company behind gawker.com and wonkette.com) is not Jason Calacanis/Weblogs, Inc. The famous celebrity photographer Michael Grecco today filed suit against Gawker Media alleging the company that one of its blogs, defamer.com, had been violating the copyright of a photo of Michael Grecco, originally published in Time Magazine (details here).

But, according to Grecco´s attorney Edward Greenberg, this is the real issue:

The suit further alleges that Gawker Media makes a practice of harvesting images from third parties and utilizing them without attribution or payment. The suit claims that Gawker Media makes daily use of images created by third parties without having obtained licenses to use such images.

I received some emails in the past from employees of blog networks stating that this is obviously a "general practice". More on this tomorrow in an update.

Related:

• "THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR USING OUR PICTURES" (StockPhotoTalk, April 13, 2004)
• "More on blogs, photos and fair use…" (Jason Calacanis, June 11, 2004)
• Blogs, Photo and Copyright: The debate continues [Copyright => Garbage?] (StockPhotoTalk, June 13, 2004)
• Again: Blogs, Photo and Copyright (StockPhotoTalk, September 17, 2004)

[Here´s the update as of Jan. 24, the email quoted was written in November 2005 by a photographer, as an answer to "The Last Wake-Up Call: Crediting The Source!". Although that story has another background -- more to come in the next weeks -- it gives some insight]:

The reason this caught my attention is because [a specific blog network] is actually one of the greatest offenders of image theft that I have noticed. This is not to say they are the worst, just that I have noticed it happening often on their blogs.

Regarding [a specific blog network] specifically, a friend of mine has recently started writing for them, so I started paying attention to the blog she writes for and I asked her where she got the images for each of her posts. 

She told me that she had been instructed to either hotlink the image or to simply download the image into a local images folder.  More often, I notice her (and others) doing the latter.  But it is not hard to find the original images if you just click on the links in the post.  Sometimes they are clearly trademarked images which I doubt they actually got the permissions to post.  Other times the image is not trademarked, but it's also very likely to be a stock or otherwise paid photo.  I would hope that the original site paid for that image (if they needed to), but I am pretty sure that [a specific blog network] authors don't track down the photo they are taking and pay for it as well.

Mainly, the problem seems to be that getting the copyrights would be prohibitively time-consuming.  I mean, if you're talking about Lost, there's no way they're going to get permissions in a timely manner that will allow them to post when they need to.  At least, that's what they seem to be saying.

I think it's just in their best interests not to worry about copyrights because in many cases, they're just not going to get the permissions.

Now maybe original hosts of the images don't generally care about this tactic because it drives traffic to their sites.  But my concern is for the photographers who are creating these images, and once they're sold, they're out there on the web for all to steal.  I have less of a problem with non-commercial sites stealing images, mainly because they are not making money off of the image they have taken.  But [a specific blog network] is a for-profit site and they are using these images to bolster their content and thus make money off of them.

Of course, it's not just [a specific blog network].  Sites like [a specific blog covering New Yörk] did this as well in the past, and I'm sure there are many, many others.

I think I have a better understanding of why [a specific blog network] and other sites like them use images the way they do.  With regard to other images, like if you need a picture of a piece of fruit just because you're talking about fruit or something, I think they could go to stock agencies (microstock to keep it cheap) and find a related image, rather than taking it from the site(s) they're talking about in the post.  But I would guess they don't do that because it's time consuming. Or maybe because it would be weird to have a policy that if you need a truly obviously copyrighted image, you ignore the problem, but if you want a picture of a piece of fruit you have to go out and pay for it.