There seems to be a storm brewing about a site that has not been in active in close to 3 years. The site did not even bother to get its own domain name opting for a free blogspot blog. The site in question is SexyExecs.blogspot.com. Sexy Execs made blog posts over a two year period. They would post a pic of an executive, some of these were user submitter pics, and then they made some snarky and sometimes critical remarks about the person. This mocking did not sit well with one person profiled, Ann Dieleman, the chief marketing officer of insurance company ARAG.
The picture was posted in 2009, it was supposedly taken in 2005, apparently ARAG copyrighted the picture in 2013. They asked Google to take the picture down and Google refused.
MediaPost covered this with the following:
The company refused, citing its “policies concerning content removal,” according to court papers. “As always, we encourage you to resolve any disputes directly with the blogger in question,” the company said in a March email to ARAG’s representative, according to papers filed with the complaint.
Dieleman and ARAG are now seeking monetary damages and an injunction forcing Google to take down the photo. “Google is aware of facts and circumstances from which the infringing activity — posting the copyrighted image — is apparent. Upon obtaining actual knowledge of infringing or facts and circumstances indicating that infringing activity is apparent, Google did not act expeditiously to remove or disable access to, the copyrighted image,” the lawsuit alleges.
It is interesting that the company is probably bringing more attention to this and have not paid any attention to the Streisand Effect.
Agreed. What waste of time and money
How is this Domain news exactly?
This blog also covers matters of Intellectual Property and Google. The case would certainly would be interesting if Google loses since the company went back and copyrighted the pic in 2013, 8 years after taken and 4 years after posted. Some stock photo companies are doing this now where they are sending bills to people running websites and blogs. The pic was free but then copyrighted after.
As I understand it, a photo is essentially copyrighted the moment it is taken, filing it with the government is not necessary to have rights to it, just a good way to establish priority. A stock photo site that offers photos free gives up that right. (I’m not a lawyer though…)