Welcome to another edition of Entitled Celebrity Gets Sued! This time it’s Paris Hilton’s turn. Photographer Claudia Fiorella Occhipinti filed a lawsuit against Hilton for editing her photographs and posting them on Instagram without permission.
Occhipinti had taken the images for a specific ad campaign with Hilton for her Electricity Perfume line. The photographer claimed that her images of Hilton could only be used by Hilton to promote her perfume “in media, on packaging, or in advertising, and that no sub-licensing is allowed.”
Occhipinti filed the lawsuit after she noticed that Hilton had taken those images and cropped and edited them into several different scenarios on her Instagram feed. The images in question include some fairly bizarre editing, some of which include unicorns, barbie dolls, unicorns, and aliens.
The original image ©Claudia Occhipinti
It’s fair to assume that Occhipinti wouldn’t want her work associated with such a hack job. However, the official reason is one of licensing. Occhipinti argues that she earns a large proportion of her income from licensing images.
One of several of the offending images
The lawsuit states:
like many commercial photographers, Ms. Occhipinti’s livelihood largely depends on revenue generated by licensing her original and commercial works for reproduction, distribution, and public display. She also relies on her name being properly credited on her work.
Paris Hilton placed her own logo or the logo of her companies or products on the photographs as if Hilton or her companies owned the photographs, intentionally creating a false impression and misleading attribution of origin that defendants are the owners or authors of the photographs.
It’s fair enough, really, and many celebrities are either unaware of copyright law, or they simply don’t care. You’d be forgiven for getting mixed up at this point about who is suing whom for what, and the number of these similar stories that are around at the moment. However, it seems to prove that photographers are no longer afraid to fight back at copyright infringement and image misuse.
[Via Range Finder]
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