August Image LLC v. AirG Inc., 2022 FC 470
Associate Justice Tabib - 2022-04-05
Read full decision. Automatically generated summary:
[The Plaintiff] claims to have acquired the exclusive rights to license six photographs of Jennifer Lopez taken by celebrity photographer Joe Pugliese. August asserts that the Defendant, airG Inc. infringed the copyright in the photographs by reproducing them without authorization on its website www.buzz.airG.com, and seeks damages in the amount of $22,412.45 for the infringement. ... It was incumbent on August to prove, on a preponderance of evidence, that Mr. Pugliese was a resident or citizen of the United States – or of any other Berne Convention country – at the time the photos were created in 2015, in order to establish that copyright subsisted in the photographs pursuant to the Copyright Act. They have failed to meet that burden. ... While airG admits to have owned the website on which the photographs were posted, there is no evidence as to who uploaded the content to the website, of the situs of the content provider, of where the server or any intermediary are located, and no evidence of any end user located in Canada. ... While the Court is satisfied that airG used the photographs on its website without authorization, the Court is not satisfied that there is a real and substantial connection between that unauthorized use and Canada.
Decision relates to:
- T-1443-18 - AUGUST IMAGE, LLC v. AIRG INC.