An Open Letter To AOL/Time Warner


To All the Important Suits, Bigwigs, Legal Council, Top Dogs at AOL/Time Warner, AOL Entertainment, and Telepictures:
There's a guy, Mario Lavandeira, who takes photo agency's pix all the time and posts them on his blog. Your web property TMZ.com links to each and every individual post on his site automatically (in their Hot Blogs section). We at X17 call this SUPPORT for his infringement of ours and others' images.
The peeps over at TMZ are aware that Lavandeira is not paying to license our images and so far nothing's been done about their linking policy. Despite our filing of a $10 million copyright infringement lawsuit against Lavandeira, they haven't altered their linking practices thusfar.
So we'd like to ask all the people listed above, why -- when a company like Time Warner is so concerned with piracy (the film industry loses approximately $3.5 billion a year to pirates) and when a company like AOL has been careful to make deals with wire services like the Agence France Presse so as to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits like the one Google settled recently with AFP -- AOL/Time Warner has allowed their AOL Entertainment/Telepictures property TMZ to continue legitimizing, supporting, and promoting the infringement perpetrated by PerezHilton by linking to each and every story in which he unlawfully uses our images.
We at X17 want to open the dialogue, point fingers, and make people in high places question their practices. Does AOL/Time Warner want to publicly throw their support behind this guy? We challenge them to take a side. Think about what it would mean to say that you support the unlicensed, unathorized use of copyrighted content anywhere and everywhere on the Internet. Is that the position you want to take?



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