Our principals include professional photographers who sell or provide the right to use the result of their creativity (photos) on the Internet. At the same time, a number of major news agencies used and continue to use their photos without permission and without paying remuneration, which we are fighting.
As agents of photographers, we regularly appeal to the arbitration courts to demand compensation from news agencies for violating their exclusive rights. The arbitration courts of the first instance satisfy our requirements, and the higher courts uphold the decisions.
The defendants usually indicate a passing of limitation, the right of news agencies to use snapshots for information purposes according to the rules of Art. 1274 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, and the lack of authorship. However, these arguments are refuted every time. In addition, the defendants insist that this category of cases should be considered in the courts of general jurisdiction, but this approach has not been successful in the arbitration court, as the authors themselves do not file claims, and we are acting as their agent. Let us refer only to some court cases under numbers A40-94815/2022, A56-45735/2022, A56-45739/2022, A56-45743/2022, A56-45748/2022, which are publicly available in the card index on the website kad.arbitr.ru, the list of cases is constantly updated.
The courts satisfy the stated requirements, recovering from 40,000 to 160,000 rubles for each photograph; the amounts vary, and court costs are also recovered, including the costs of our representation of photographers in court.
