Posted by Merk
November 30th, 2011
Categories: Front Pages | 7 Comments
=
US photo agency files copyright suit against Daily Mail
Posted by sim-o
November 14th, 2011
The Daily Mail have, allegedly, been nicking photos again. And the owner of the photos is not happy. Really, they are in fact $1.5 million not happy…
Florida based celebrity photo agency Mavrix have filed suit against the British newspaper for multiple copyright infringements, and are seeking statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement. With up to 10 images involved the total sought comes to $1.5m plus attorney’s fees and “any such other and further relief as the Court may deem just and appropriate”.
Marvix seem to have got a court in the California to issue proceedings against the Daily Mail, where compensation for this sort of thing is higher than in the UK because, although the Mail is a UK company, it has substantial connections to the the US, namely:
- They have a bureau in Los Angeles
- A print version of the Mail is made available for sale in California
- According to traffic monitoring companies 2.8 million visitors a month are from the US
- The Mail is published by Associated Newspapers Ltd, which is part of Daily Mail and General Trust Plc. DMGT is a “multi-billion dollar publicly traded media conglomerate entity that operates in over 40 countries, including the United States” with “facilities at the California Market Center, Los Angeles” and Ass. Newspapers and DMGT “are all part of the same entity, do not enjoy seperate corporate structure and function as one common enterprise and/or as alter egos of each other”.
The court documents (.pdf) also state…
the Daily Mail, with the assistance of its online picture editor, Elliot Wagland, has “a history of copyright piracy conduct. Indeed, the pattern and practice of Defendants is to ignore the demand of photo agencies or photographers to agree to rates before use and to simply take the pictures and use them without compensation or to then offer token compensation.
Could this be the case that has an affect on the behaviour of the Mail?
h/t @waxnip
Categories: Copyright | Tags: Copyright, photos | 3 Comments
Winterval
Posted by Dave Cross
November 8th, 2011
[This is cross-posted from davblog]
From today’s Daily Mail corrections column:
We stated in an article on 26 September that Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval.
Winterval was the collective name for a season of public events, both religious and secular, which took place in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998.
We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas.
This is amazing stuff. The Mail has been one of the main papers pushing the “Winterval” myth for many years. At the recent media bloggers meet-up someone said that our constant debunking of this myth was beginning to have some traction, but I didn’t expect to get a correction from the Daily Mail quite so soon.
On the Mail Corrections site I like to link back to the original story. And in this case it seems to be a column by Melanie Phillips where she claimed that “Christmas has been renamed in various places ‘Winterval’”. This, as the Mail now admits, didn’t happen. She ties this non-event in with the recent furore about the BBC banning the terms BC and AD (something else that didn’t happen). Phillips strongly defended her view in an email discussion with Kevin Arscott, so it’s nice to see even the Mail admitting that she was wrong.
Of course, it’ll be interesting to watch what happens next. Will all Mail writers get a memo telling them to stop repeating the lie? It’s approaching prime Winterval season, surely Richard Littlejohn or Peter Hitchens will want to write about it soon.
As always when discussing this myth, I need to link to Kevin Arscott’s forensic investigation of the evidence which is the most thorough debunking of a tabloid lie that I’ve ever seen.
Update: The Mail has updated Phillips’ original column to remove the reference to Winterval and to add the following note at the bottom:
A previous version of this article stated that Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval. Winterval was the collective name for a season of public events, both religious and secular, which took place in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998. We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas.
That’s the first time I’ve seen them explicitly update a corrected article like that. I hope it’s the start of a trend. This has been a good date for tabloid accuracy in Britain.
Categories: Melanie Philips, Religion | 2 Comments
