lawsuit

When working with paid subjects in shoots, it's always important to have written contracts and signed releases to prove that you have permission to do what you wish with what you capture. Here's what can happen if you rely on verbal agreements...

Last year, a video of a woman being catcalled more than 100 times while walking around NYC for 10 hours went viral online, amassing over 40 million views. Now the woman is suing the creator of the video for $500,000, claiming that she never gave written permission for the video to be used before it was widely published and promoted.

A federal court has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Nike by photographer Jacobus Rentmeester, who claimed that the sports juggernaut had ripped off his 1984 photo of Michael Jordan for its own photo and its iconic Jumpman logo.

If you're wondering why copyright infringement is so widespread on the Web and why wealthy artists like Richard Prince can test the boundaries of copyright law without much worry, consider this: by the time photographer Daniel Morel won $1.2 million in 2013 after a 5-year copyright battle, his law firm had racked up a staggering $2.5 million in legal fees and costs -- most of which won't be paid.

A Seattle-based fine art photographer is suing Pinterest for infringing upon his copyrights and other intellectual property rights. Christopher Boffoli claims that his photographs have been posted over 5,000 times on the public site, and that Pinterest isn’t doing enough to “protect photographers and their work”.

The Vivian Maier story has taken another ironic turn as Jeffrey Goldstein (who once owned the second largest collection of Vivian Maier negatives) has filed suit against the Vivian Maier Estate.

The lawsuit is puts a dollar value on the work he has done if he’s forced to turn over his remaining assets to the estate. We talked to Jeffrey to find out why he filed the suit and what he sees coming next in the Vivian Maier story.

Motorola Mobility has been ordered by a court ruling to fork over $10.2 million to Fujifilm for violating one of the Japanese company's camera patents in its mobile phones.

A court in Spain has ordered that a photographer pay €8,000 (~$8,800) to a newly-married couple after he lost their wedding photos and couldn't deliver what they paid for.

Remember the story of Andrea Polito, the photographer who was publicly accused by a couple of holding their wedding photos hostage until they paid an extra $150 fee for a cover for their album?

It came to light afterward that the couple may have intentionally gone to the media with their story in order to destroy Polito and her business, and the photographer is now suing the couple for defamation, seeking up to $1 million in damages for the damage they did.

NYC-based photographer Arne Svenson, whom we interviewed last month, has won a lengthy legal battle against people who claimed that he had invaded their privacy by taking pictures of them in their homes through open windows.

In August I hired ImageRights International, a reputable copyright enforcement agency, to assume the routine handling of commercial infringements of my professional work. There are a lot. Starting in September 2014, companies began receiving letters from ImageRights’ partner law firms seeking to resolve these infringements on my behalf.

In an age in which pageviews are supreme, blogs and other online publications often ignore copyright laws, publishing viral photographs without permission in order to attract clicks and eyeballs. While much of the time this type of behavior flies under the radar, sometimes the unethical behavior comes back to bite the publishers hard when photographers do notice and take action.

Here's one of the latest examples: photojournalist Peter Menzel has filed a lawsuit against the blog EliteDaily for sharing his photos in a viral post without permission.

Los Angeles has agreed to pay a $50,000 settlement to three photographers after they were detained by LA County Sheriffs while taking pictures in public places. As part of the settlement, the city will also teach its sheriff deputies that photography is not a crime.

Ronald K. Fierstein is a man who has had a front row seat to the evolution of photography as we know it. He's a lawyer who helped represent Polaroid during its lengthy legal battle with Eastman Kodak over patents.

Fierstein has written a new book that sheds light on the life and career of Polaroid founder Edwin Land, the "original Steve Jobs" (Jobs revered Land and modeled his career after his). It's titled A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War.

A US court has ruled in favor of Bob Marley's family in a lawsuit they filed to get photos of the late reggae musician off unauthorized merchandise. The ruling will impact how iconic portraits of Marley are used for commercial purposes by third parties.

Should you be able to patent the idea of online photo contests? Regardless of your opinion on the matter, someone has, and that patent is now being used to sue a number of small photo websites.

Here's a strange legal rumble that just hit the courts: software giant Adobe is suing clothing giant Forever 21 for pirating copies of Photoshop.

A photographer has filed a copyright lawsuit against Nike, accusing the global athletic brand of ripping off his photograph of Michael Jordan to create its iconic "Jumpman" logo for Air Jordan merchandise.

Renowned Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has been found guilty in a plagiarism case after basing one of his paintings on a photo by photojournalist Katrijn Van Giel. Tuymans has been ordered to cease exhibiting and reproducing his painting, and will be fined €500,000 (~$580,000) if he does not comply.

Hello fellow photographers. My name is Joshua Resnick. I am a stock photographer, but what I am going to tell you potentially affects all photographers. I wanted to bring to your attention a lawsuit I am involved in that I think could put the whole industry at risk if things don’t go well.

I am being sued in federal court for hundreds of thousands of dollars by a model I worked with in January 2013. This is a model that I paid, and who signed a release allowing me to sell her images through stock photo agencies. Why I am I being sued? It revolves around images that got misused or were just outright stolen and the model is blaming me for it.

On July 14, 2012, I received a desperate email from a photographer whom I had only met once briefly at a public appearance. He was terribly distraught, and nobody would help him. In his letter, he said that I was his last resort.

His name is Nelson Tang, and he is a very gentle soul, kind and soft-spoken, a new immigrant from Hong Kong with only a rough command of the English language. At the time, he and his wife were adjusting to life with an 18 month old son, she was a server in a restaurant and he worked for a non-profit. Financially, they were living paycheck to paycheck.

A couple years ago, I read a story about a Washington wedding photographer that was threatened with a $300,000 lawsuit by an ex-client. The story then seemed to drop out of sight. Sometime thereafter, I decided to put on my investigative reporter mustache and do some sleuthing. Was the threat real? Did a lawsuit actually get filed? If so, what was the result?

A Canadian judge has ordered Google to pay a Montreal woman for the violation of her privacy after she found an embarrassing photograph of herself on Google Street View. Google's automated cameras had captured the woman sitting on her doorstep, leaning forward with a portion of her cleavage exposed.

We've heard of many lawsuits where an artist outright steals an image from a photographer -- that can get pretty ugly -- but what about an artist hiring another photographer to recreate an image that is pretty much identical to the one they wanted to use, but weren't allowed to?

That's the crux of a lawsuit between celebrity photographer Bonnie Schiffman and musician Rod Stewart, who, it seems, recreated an iconic photograph of Schiffman's after she refused to let the artist use it.

It's not unreasonable to expect that almost every person reading this has seen 'nanny photographer' Vivian Maier's work. Whether in galleries, online or in the much-talked-about documentary 'Finding Vivian Maier,' her photos have now made their way around the world many times over and she has been named one of the greats of 20th century photography.

But if you hold a deep appreciation for Maier's work, we suggest you get your fill while you can, because a legal battle is threatening (and, in fact, succeeding) to pull Maier's work from the public eye... potentially for years.

A recently-released product by Microsoft that allows content creators to embed digital images on their websites is being called a “massive infringement” of copyright images in a lawsuit filed by Getty Images against the computer giant.

More than two years after being arrested, injured and strip-searched after taking pictures of two NYPD police officers performing a stop and frisk, a Brooklyn man has been awarded a nice legal pay day to the tune of $125K.

David Slater, the photographer who is currently embroiled in an argument (and quite possibly, soon to be embroiled in a lawsuit) with Wikimedia over the famous 'monkey selfie' images, recently spoke to ITN to clarify his position on the whole 'who owns the copyright' argument.

At least one of the class action lawsuits against Nikon about the sensor spec issue found on some D600 cameras has been settled, and settled in the best possible way for the users participating in this suit.

The controversy surrounding the monkey selfies above, which were taken by an endangered crested black macaque using photographer David Slater's equipment, is heating up once again as Wikipedia parent Wikimedia refuses to remove the photo from its commons library, claiming that Slater does not own the copyright.

The next time you want to photograph some cool graffiti, you might want to think twice... you could get sued by the artist if that picture makes it big.

After the popular Canadian drama 30 Vies aired, graffiti artist Alexandre Veilleux recognized a tag of his in the opening sequence. Now, Veilleux -- who goes by Alex Scaner in the graffiti community -- is seeking $45k in damages from Radio-Canada and Productions Aetios Inc., stating they used his work without permission.

The American Civil Liberties Union is helping four individuals take the United States Government to court over something called the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative.

The program has received wide criticism recently, led in large part by a photographer who made the FBI's suspicious activity list for taking pictures of a piece of public art called the Rainbow Swash.

"This is a Satire Website. Fictional Stories Just for laughs." That's the line you'll find if you scroll to the bottom of the ODGossip website. But when they posted that the subject of an embarrassing Meme was suing Instagram for $500 million, blogs and publications the world over went ahead and ran with it.

Three years ago, in late July of 2011, freelance news photographer Philip Datz was arrested by the Suffolk County Police Department in New York for “obstruction of governmental administration” because he was recording the conclusion of a police chase from a safe distance away.

Last we told you about the case, the police were dropping the charges and officers were going to have to go through "media relations training," but the case has gone much further than that in the intervening three years.

Although there’s no shortage of press surrounding young pop star, Justin Bieber, today he’s getting a bit more in the form of a lawsuit from photographer Manuel Munoz.

Munoz is suing both Bieber and his bodyguard, Dwayne Patterson, after an incident outside the SET Nightclub in Miami Beach, where Patterson supposedly locked him in a Subway restaurant, demanding he delete his photos of the pop star if he wanted to leave.

In a lawsuit filed this Monday, Ohio-based model Nicole Forni is seeking half a million dollars in damages from Columbus photographer Joshua Resnick after he sent photographs from a shoot they collaborated on to at least three dozen pornographic-oriented web outlets.

In a copyright battle truly worthy of the David and Goliath designation, it seems that Walmart and its founding family, the Waltons, have filed a lawsuit against the widow of a photographer who ran a small Arkansas studio called Bob's Studio of Photography.

Four years after the “unlawful seizure and destruction” of video from a citizen's phone took place, and thanks to some pressure from the US Department of Justice, The City of Baltimore has agreed to pay a fine to the tune of $250,000 to set things right.

In a somewhat interesting turn of events regarding an extremely well-known photograph of former football star Desmond Howard, it has been settled that Howard will now be owner of the photograph, originally captured by photographer Brian Masck.

News that Nikon had been replacing some defective D600s with brand new D610s broke months ago, but it wasn't confirmed officially until late last night when Nikon announced the news itself.

In the age of the Internet, with sites like Yelp often being the first stop for anybody looking for a service (say, photography) they've never used before, it's no surprise that pros are trying to keep their star ratings as high as possible.

What is surprising is the news that some photographers are keeping their reviews positive by threatening to sue anybody who writes something negative.