US court action challenges Daily Mail photo theft

THE DAILY MAIL is being sued in the US over its habit of lifting photos from social media. On 30 June Californian photographer Matthew Moore filed suit against Associated Newspapers in London and its offshoot Mail Media in New York. He invites others to join him using the “class action” mechanism in US law.

Matthew's own interest is that the Daily Mail took a portrait that a client had posted to her Instagram account and ran it in the paper, emblazoned “© instagram”. As his complaint notes, “counsel reviewed the Daily Mail’s United States edition by hand and found 107 articles that published a photograph - often more than one - taken from social media and bearing a false ‘© [platform]’ credit” in a nine-day period.

The complaint sets out the difficulties faced by photographers (and other authors) in pursuing claims in the US, lists several cases that did manage to get to court, and concludes that “Defendants have long known that this conduct is actionable because they have been sued for it repeatedly across more than fifteen years, and not one suit changed a thing.“

The Freelance recalls the practice going back further than that. In the early 1990s, before the World-Wide Web existed, we were told that it was standard practice at the Mail titles to use photographs with an “await claim” annotation in the filing system - putting the onus on the photographer to spot the use of the image and issue an invoice.

Photographers, like other authors, have no “moral right” to a byline. But there are penalties for giving false “copyright management information” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): the complaint estimates “that nine-day, hand-counted sample already exposes the Daily Mail to more than ten million dollars per year in liability at the DMCA statutory floor alone”.

By 3 July the Daily Mail seemed to have changed part of its practice: photos were appearing on the UK website stamped with “credits” in the form “© Jane Doe Instagram”. Of course this still does not help photographers find these uses.

Matthew is being represented by Jaymie Parkkinen, who has worked on a case by Elon Musk against Anthropic AI and is representing performer Maren Flagg, who is suing Taylor Swift over the branding of The Life of a Showgirl. Sub-editors got all excited about the headline potential of the discovery that Jaymie also works as a clown and mime.

The Freelance is endeavouring to contact all parties for comment and clarification: click here to refresh this page with updates.

© Mike Holderness

Daily Mail sued over ‘systematic’ lifting of social media images Charlotte Tobitt at pressgazette.co.uk