Copyright Victory for David Morel

摘要

In late November 2013, a jury at the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in Manhattan found AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Getty Images guilty of copyright infringement and awarded photojournalist David Morel $1.2 million. This amount was the maximum allowed for the unlawful reuse of his photos illustrating the destruction in Haiti caused by the 2010 earthquake, which he had posted on Twitter. Morel was also awarded an additional $20,000 based on a finding that the news organizations had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Both Getty and AFP had not only sourced and redistributed eight of Morel's photos of the damages caused by the earthquake, they also misidentified the source of these photos, which were reposted under the name of another Twitter user. AFP then picked up the images and distributed them through its own image service and through Getty under this false credit.