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US District Court dismisses Carol Highsmith’s $1 billion copyright claim against Getty

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Although some quite enjoyed the idea of seeing Getty get a good legal spanking for once, that is not how things are turning out. US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff has dismissed all of Carol Highsmith’s federal copyright claims. After the dismissal on October 28th, he left three of Highsmith’s state law claims intact. Those, too, have now been voluntarily dismissed after Highsmith and Getty have reached an agreement to settle the case.

For those who missed it, Highsmith filed suit in July after she discovered that Getty had been charging fees to license images she had created without her consent. She only realised this after they attempted to bill her for the use of one of her own photographs and did a little digging. They had attempted to sell almost 19,000 images she had created.

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Getty responds to $1 Billion lawsuit: If you put your photos in public domain, don’t come whining to us

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OK, those are not the exact words of Getty, but this is what their response feels like. As you may recall we reported this 1 Billion dollars lawsuit back in July. If you want the background, Getty sent an infringement notice to one Carol M. Highsmith. Here is the funny thing. Carol M. Highsmith was the photographer who took the photo in the first place.

In response, Carol sued Getty for 1 billion dollars for “gross misuse” of 18,755 of her photographs, she claims that Getty “falsely and fraudulently holding themselves out as the exclusive copyright owner” (The amount comes from $25K per image in statutory damages times three).

Now it’s Getty’s time to respond (and they did file a response on September 6th) and here is what they are saying:

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Getty asks photographer to pay for her own photo, photographer responds with $1 billion lawsuit

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Getty can be pretty quick to send out infringement letters, as well they should. In the case of a real infringement, they absolutely must be protecting the rights of their contributors. But what happens when Getty screws up and sends an infringement notice to the creator of the photograph?

What then happens if Getty also try to sell almost 19,000 of the same photographer’s images without permission? Well, that’s what happened to photographer Carol M. Highsmith and she’s suing Getty for the maximum available under the law.

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