Perez Gets His Ass Sued
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007Apparently the photo agencies are tired of this shit. From SplashNews:
We hit Perez Hilton with a multi-million million dollar copyright lawsuit yesterday.
Five celebrity photo agencies - Splash, Bauer-Griffin, Flynet, INF and London Entertainment Pictures warned Perez last December that we could no longer accept his unlawful use of copyright pictures without payment or credit.
He and his lawyers have refused to pay up and refused to take down unlawfully obtained photos. They don’t even have the decency to respond.
Most bloggers out there are decent, honest business people who understand the photographers need to earn an income and we thank all of you who do pay and credit and we are happy to supply you so you can entertain your readers.
But the time has come to show Perez he can no longer get rich off the back of other peoples’ work.
News reports and some boasting from Perez put his income at over $800,000 a year from advertising revenue and his appearances on TV shows, TV programs etc.
He says he gets up to 4 million unique visitors a day. Yet he doesn’t pay a cent to anyone whose material he uses to get fame and fortune.
$800,000 a year? Honestly, I think that’s a pretty gross underestimate. Even his cheapest Blogads go for $1200/week. His most expensive go for $9000/week. He has at least 10 running at a time. Let’s assume they are all priced at $1200. That’s $624,000 right there. That is not counting what he’s charging for advertising on his background (probably over $2000/day, although he doesn’t have one running each day), for ads in his feeds, and for personal appearances. He’s paying hosting costs and maybe some modest web design costs, but his overhead is negligible. He’s easily clearing a million annually in pre-tax earnings.
Check out the rest of the details after the jump.
