Celebrity blogger sued for stealing photos worth millions

Dec 01, 2006

Stealing intellectual property is increasingly becoming “bad” in the blogsphere and in the online publishing world, and I’m happy it is happening. Recently I wrote about a French production company suing Google for showing its movie free over the Internet. Now someone called Perez Hilton has been sued by seven photo agencies for steeling photographs of Hollywood actors and actresses. The agencies claim he or she (I’m not sure whether it’s a he or a she — from her blog it seems it’s she because there is a photograph at the right hand side that is captioned as “Perez went to Amsterdam”) has stolen photographs worth millions of dollars.

We all use photographs from other websites while making sure they are not causing commercial harm. But it is silly if you are using commercial photographs without paying a syndication fee or something.

Update [December 3, 2006]: I just stumbled upon this post by Liz on Blogging Times — Perez Hilton is a he. There’s also a photograph of his in the post.

Technorati Tags: Perez Hilton, photo blogging, content theft, copyright violation