Improperly selling her work to customers, alleges lawsuit.
Photographer Carol Highsmith, whose work has been featured in books, newspapers and magazines and on two postage stamps, and who lets the public use thousands of her images of America for free has sued the Getty Images photo agency for more than $1 billion, saying it is improperly selling her work to customers and threatening those who don’t pay.
Highsmith said she became aware that Getty was selling her work in December, when she received a letter from an affiliated company accusing her of copyright infringement for using one of her own photographs on the website of her nonprofit group, the This is America Foundation. The letter demanded a settlement payment of $120, reported the Associated Press.
Highsmith’s lawsuit, which was before a federal judge in New York for an initial conference Wednesday, said about 18,000 of the photographs in that collection were being offered for sale by Getty, at prices of $175 to $575.
Based on those numbers, her lawyers are asking for $468 million in damages tripled because Getty had a judgment entered against it in another copyright case within the last three years.
Highsmith, who lives in Takoma Park, Md., did not attend Wednesday’s court session and declined to be interviewed, reported AP.
A lawyer for Getty Images, Kenneth Doroshow, told the judge he plans to ask for the lawsuit to be dismissed.
The Seattle company said last month that the lawsuit is based on “misconceptions.†It said it’s standard practice for image libraries to distribute content that’s in the public domain. And it said it’s legal to charge fees to cover costs including indexing, archiving, digitizing and making content easily searchable.
Highsmith, in her lawsuit, said that in sharing the photographs through the Library of Congress, she never intended to abandon the copyright to those images or to enable third parties to sell them for profit “or send threatening letters to people who used her photos.â€
Highsmith’s photos are among 15 million images in the library’s Prints & Photographs archive, which also includes the work of Civil War master photographer Mathew Brady and Depression and Dust Bowl photojournalist Dorothea Lange.