Photojournalist Brings Copyright Suit Against Yahoo

A photojournalist has accused Yahoo of infringing her copyright by posting six photos she took of villagers in Ghana.

Matilde Gattoni, who founded the agency Tandem Reportages, alleges in a complaint filed late last month that Yahoo featured her photographs last October in the online news story "West Africa Is Bring Swallowed by the Sea."

At the conclusion of the story, an italicized sentence directed readers to Gattoni's photo essay "The Waves Will Take Us Away," according to court documents.

Gattoni alleges in her complaint that she didn't license any of her photos to Yahoo.

The story appears to have been published originally by Foreign Policy Magazine. It wasn't immediately clear whether Yahoo licensed the piece from Foreign Policy, and, if so what that license covered.

Last year, Yahoo was sued for copyright infringement by Kali Kanongataa, a father who live-streamed his his son's birth on Facebook. ABC's "Good Morning America" ran an item about the stream and showed a brief, 22-second excerpt of the 45-minute video. A snippet of the video also appeared on Yahoo (which has a partnership with ABC), NBC Universal and other companies.

Yahoo, ABC and NBC prevailed in that case in February, when U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the company made fair use of the clip.

ABC, Yahoo and NBC recently asked to be awarded at least $140,000 in attorneys' fees and court costs from Kanongataa and his lawyer. Kaplan hasn't yet ruled on that request.

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