The Plaintiff in this copyright lawsuit is an attorney and professional photographer living in McCordsville, Indiana. In 2000, Plaintiff took two photographs of the downtown Indianapolis skyline from a location on the Canal near the USS Indianapolis Memorial. Both of Plaintiff’s photographs were duly registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and posted on the Internet in August 2000. All of the various defendants have allegedly utilized Plaintiff’s photographs on their respective websites without permission.

Website owners, you should immediately check your websites to determine whether you know the source of EVERY photograph. Unless you’re certain that you have permission to use the photographs (or qualify for some exception to copyright infringement like fair use), remove/replace the photographs at once. These photograph copyright lawsuits have been occurring for far too long to continue to plead ignorance or innocent infringement. Take your own photographs, hire a photographer or license existing photographs. But don’t get caught in a lawsuit because you take the easy way out and grab an image from Google.

Whatever you do, definitely don’t use Plaintiff’s photographs…he has a long history of litigation to enforce his copyrights:

Richard N. Bell v. Mark Arruda

Bell v. Indy Cleaning Pros

Richard N. Bell v. Greg Bayers LLC et al.

Richard N. Bell v. Jerry Gordon et al.

Richard Bell v. Cameron Taylor et al.