UPDATE FRIDAY NOVEMBER 22, 9:40 PM
A jury has awarded photographer Daniel Morel $1.22 million in damages after deciding that Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Getty Images willfully violated his copyright. The award is the maximum statutory damages the court allowed for infringement on eight photographs. "[It's] one thousand times what the defendants told the jury it should award as actual damages for their wrongful acts — $275,000 as opposed to $275.‎" according to the British Journal of Photography. The jury's findings are subject to appeal.

Closing arguments in the Daniel Morel vs. Agence France Presse (AFP)/Getty Images trial began yesterday morning in the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at Foley Square. This is the penalty phase in the copyright infringement case brought against the two media giants by Daniel Morel, a photojournalist who was on the ground during the Haiti earthquake of 2010, and who was one of the first to cover the catastrophe. Here is a capsule report of proceedings.

First up was AFP lead counsel Joseph Kaufman, who basically repeated his opening remarks, pointing out that AFP was a charitable organization that took care of its photographers. He harped on about how “everybody makes mistakes,” and that AFP, a huge corporation, should be viewed as human in this regard. The payment to Mr. Morel he is recommending is $120,000.


Daniel Morel (5th from left) outside the Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse with students from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with their photography teacher Anne Turyn, on Wednesday. The students and tutor were visiting the trial of AFP and Getty Images for willful copyright infringement of Morel’s 2010 Haiti earthquake images. © Jeremy Nicholl.

The lead attorney for Getty Images, Marcia Paul, continued her defense of the misuse of Mr. Morel’s images by blaming AFP for supplying photographs erroneously attributed to one Lisandro Suero, which had been posted online. Then she likened Mr. Morel’s work on the Haiti earthquake to sending a photographer out to shoot a high school baseball team for a day rate of $275, so the monetary award to him should be on the low side.

After a 10-minute break, Joe Baio took the floor and slammed the Getty defense by saying, “They actually take a $275 day rate and try to use that as a benchmark for damages. It’s insulting.” He then went through the evidence and testimony, and demonstrated, over the next hour and 20 minutes, the legal basis on which the jury must determine the award to Mr. Morel for the two media giants’ alleged willful and deliberate copyright infringement.

Picking through damning evidence in the form of e-mails and invoices, he showed that Getty failed to even verify, before using as news photos, the location, time, source, publication and copyright—this from the agency’s own rulebook—of photographs lifted from social media sites, which is where Mr. Morel’s photographs had been posted, without his consent, by the mysterious Mr. Suero.

Then Baio informed the jury why Mr. Morel’s photographs were significant and why he should be given a significant payment for the use of his photographs plus a substantial penalty award for the copyright infringement that has already been proven. In the days following the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, Baio asked, “Whose photographs appeared on page one of newspapers around the world, and on the covers of major newsweeklies? Daniel Morel’s photographs did.”

Summing up, Baio quoted Getty’s defense mantra, “Why would we do this?” Becoming almost surley, Baio said, “I’ll tell you why: they did it because they could. They did it because they’re AFP and Getty. They thought: ‘We can put these pictures out and buy this guy off.’ They did it because they’re the biggest guys on the block and that’s the way they are.”