Complete Story
05/24/2018
Why media companies fear this lawyer who sues for copyright violations of photographs
Our story starts with Geno Smith getting punched in the jaw by a teammate, as most good stories about copyright law do. It was August 2015, and the then-quarterback for the New York Jets got clocked in a practice altercation that sent him into surgery and sidelined him for the start of the NFL season. Two days after Smith’s surgery, a photojournalist named Angel Chevrestt spotted the shirtless, puffy-cheeked quarterback standing outside his apartment, tossing a football to a friend. Chevrestt took some pictures and licensed them to the New York Post, where they ran alongside an article titled “Big Mouth! Geno Emerges for First Time Post-Sucker Punch Surgery.”
Later that day, a CBS website ran its own story about Smith’s emergence and used Chevrestt’s photographs as accompanying art. The problem, according to Chevrestt, was that CBS had neither licensed his pictures, obtained his permission to display them, nor credited him as the photographer. CBS television also briefly used Chevrestt’s photos of Smith during its broadcast of a Jets preseason football game later that month, again without credit or explicit permission. Smith, it seems, wasn’t the only one who got sucker-punched.
In the print era, photojournalists did not spend all that much time worrying about copyright infringement, as stealing a news photograph often required more effort than actually licensing the image. But in this screenshot, drag-and-drop, endlessly Instagrammable world, copyright infringement—the unauthorized reproduction, display, and/or distribution of a copyrighted work—has become an inescapable fact of life for working photographers.
