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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.

Sounds about right.

Could this be the case that has an affect on the behaviour of the Mail?

h/t @waxnip

Categories: Copyright | Tags: , | 7 Comments