‘Most-Hated’ blogger sued
p2pnet.net News:- PerezHilton.com is, “Hollywood’s Most-Hated Web Site!” – it brags smugly.
“PerezHilton.com is all about gossip and satire,” says its disclaimer. “The content that is published contains rumors, speculation, assumptions, opinions, and factual information. Postings may contain erroneous or inaccurate information. The owner of this site does not insure the accurateness of any content presented on PerezHilton.com.”
The problem is, says X17 Inc, some of the pictorial content belongs to X17.
Known for, “the aggressive pursuit of celebrity prey,” X17 claims PerezHilton has been engaging in “blatant theft” to the extent that X17 is suing it for $7.6-million for copyright infringement, according to Robin Abcarian in the The Los Angeles Times.
The story quotes X17 as saying Hilton used 51 photos without permission, payment or credit, also observing it’s, “hard to know whom to sympathize with”.
On one side, “the paparazzi who stalk celebrities in their moments of greatest vulnerability – at doctors’ offices, with their newborns, when they are falling-down drunk”.
“On the other, “a blogger who helps himself to those photos, scrawls puerile comments on them, and posts them on his immensely popular and profitable website”.
Brandy Navarre co-owns X17 with her husband, Francois Navarre.
“Regarding your article about X17 suing Perez, you asked me why I’m suing Perez and not another blogger and that’s when I gave the answer that it’s because he’s the most blatant infringer and the most arrogant (I never said pigheaded, by the way),” she tells Abcarian on the X17 site.
“That was not my answer as to why I’m suing him. To give that quotation to Perez as the reason for our lawsuit against him is bad journalism in my opinion. And pitching the story in the second paragraph, as somehow less serious or valid because we take paparazzi images and not ‘news’ images, is confusing the issue. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement no matter what you, personally, see as the value of the material.”
And to, “all the Perez fans out there – I’m not jealous of Perez. I wish he had been able to do what he does legally because I quite enjoy his site. The battle we’re fighting is not a grade-school argument, it is a legal issue and our aim is to protect the images we work so hard at getting. Perez just had to pay for the images like everyone else and he chose not to do so, which has landed him where he is, squarely at the center of this lawsuit.”
No prizes for guessing which Nicole Richie (who’s she?) pic comes from which site.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
The Los Angeles Times – Perez Hilton takes their best shots, December 17, 2006
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December 18th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Do the Navarre’s pay the celebrities for the use of the photos on
THEIR profitable web site ?