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BC student Web site tangled up in lawsuit over Dylan photo
By adamg on Fri, 07/22/2016 - 10:18am
A North Carolina photographer wants the Gavel to pay him up to $150,000 because, he says, it used one of his photos without permission back in 2013.
David Oppenheimer, of Asheville, NC, says the site used this Dylan photo for a since deleted column about various topics, including the singer and Candy Crush.
In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, Oppenheimer wants the students who run the site to fully account for all the profits they made by using the photo, but if it turns out there aren't any, then he wants them to pay "such Statutory Damages as to the Court shall appear just within the provisions of the Copyright Act in a sum not less than $750 nor more than $30,000, or if the Court finds that the infringement was committed willfully, such statutory damages as to the Court shall appear just within the provisions of the Copyright Act in a sum up to and including $150,000." Plus, of course, lawyers' fees.
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| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 Complete Oppenheimer complaint | 103.57 KB |
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Comments
Kids gotta learn
about fair use.
Photographers are getting killed in retirement by no longer having the royalties stream they were planning on. College students in media should understand that.
And photographers, performers, and the like
have got to learn that the proper and ethical way to make more money is to do more work, instead of continuing to leech off past work that one has already been paid for.
And suing a student newspaper to get those extra unjustified payments is below low.
It's not necessarily already been paid for
If I shoot a photo, and the deal is that you can use it for $1, but I retain rights to also license it to other people in the future, those other people can't just take it without paying, and say that it was already paid for.
This is commerce, and charging money for your skilled services, not leeching.
Is The Gavel its own corporation?
Not just a student group of BC, with no legal firewall to shield BC from liabilities?
Lets see.... a student
Lets see.... a student newspaper... that does not charge for viewing / subscription...
IMO, Fair Use. Read the four point test: http://libguides.mit.edu/usingimages
Going after students is a waste of resources and taking them to court is hardly a good teachable moment.
Sounds more like the photographer is out of gigs and needs money so he trolled the wayback machine to see if anyone was using his pictures.
I see what you did there
With that headline.
Try not to spend too much time standing in line the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck.