Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:53PM12 comments ›
Fri Jun 20, 2008 — by Rick Marshall
Leaked 'Iron Man' Photo Now Subject of Lawsuit
Bad photo becomes good photo becomes lawsuit photo
When movie site IESB.net posted one of the first images of the Iron Man suit last May, to say that the leaked photo from the set of Iron Man created a bit of a buzz might be the understatement of the year.
It didn't take long, however, for the studios involved with the film to direct their full legal attention to the movie news site, forcing it to shut down for a period of time and generating an entirely different kind of buzz.
Well, it seems like the legal tussle over the photo will have yet another chapter, as attentive members of the Iron Man audience might have noticed a familiar image on the front page of a newspaper Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is reading in a scene near the end of the film. Photographer Ronnie Adams, who shot the initial "leaked" Iron Man photo that started all of the hub-bub, is now alledging that the movie studios used his infamous photo in a "pivotal scene" during Iron Man, and is asking for unspecified monetary damages.
Adams filed a lawsuit regarding the photo last week against Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment, and also asked that the photo be removed from any future DVDs or videogames related to Iron Man.
Full-size versions of the original, "leaked" image and the offending Iron Man scene (according to Adams' lawsuit) are posted after the jump for comparison.
(via pdnonline)
Jump to comments (12) 
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Comments (12)
Michael Davis (8:44 PM on Fri Jun 20, 2008)
WHO GIVES A S**T?
Rick Marshall (9:48 PM on Fri Jun 20, 2008)
I do! Otherwise I wouldn't have posted it. ;) And according to the site's traffic, I'm far from the only person, too... *shrug*
In the end, I am merely a servant to the readership, sir.
Michael Davis (1:24 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
Rick-crazy lawsuits me me NUTS!!!! My ire was at the people suing over this not you for posting it.
mike weber (2:00 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
Sue not, lest ye be judged.
Expensively.
Rick Marshall (2:09 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
No worries, Michael - I took no offense whatsoever. Crazy lawsuits drive me bat-shite loony, too. I'm not sure how I feel about this one, as I didn't agree with IESB getting shut down over the photo to begin with, but the photog's claims aren't exactly easy to digest, either.
It's one of those "everybody's wrong" scenarios, as far as i'm concerned.
If i were the presiding judge, they'd be forced to watch "Elektra" and David Hasselhoff's "Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD" over and over until they agreed to play nice. But that's just me.
Mike Gold (6:58 PM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
Well, here's textbook damning with faint praise, but Hasselhoff's Fury was nowhere near as bad as Elektra. Or Catwoman. Or at least two of the Batman movies. Or at least three of the Superman movies. Or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Actually, it would have been a perfectly fine teevee movie... if it were, oh, 1974.
Luciano Pimentel (7:27 PM on Sat Jun 28, 2008)
LXG - worse than Hasselhoff's turn as Fury?!? You may want to substitute that awful JLA movie for the LXG - and have it be "TV fare vs TV fare" from about the same time period too...
But if you'd persist in being intemporal in your comparisons, I'd then raise you with a Casino Royale (the one with David Niven and Peter Sellers!) being a far worse mish-mash of characters and perversion of the source material than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ever could be deemed to be...!
Plus, LXG has the real James Bond in it!
;)
Alan Coil (7:44 PM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
YOU DO, Michael. It's called intellectual property rights. The guy took the picture. The Marvel movie used the picture without permission. Looks like an identical picture to me, perhaps with the color altered a bit to make it brighter. I hope the guy wins several thousand.
Russ Rogers (11:14 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
I think it's poetic justice. The photograph used in the movie doesn't look to be the same, just a recreation of the illegally released image. Then again, for some, "A swipe is a swipe."
I don't think the suing photographer has a leg to stand on. But I'm not a lawyer
Karl Cramer (11:20 AM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
Win or lose, if the studio's smart they'll use the case to have the paparazzi document how he found out about the shoot and how he got the photo. For future defense.
mike weber (4:05 PM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
They know how he got the pic - it was one of several he shot from a neighbouring roof - it's in the original article this post references.
And notice that they didn't try to sue the photographer - because they couldn't.
He was operating within his rights when he took it, and it had news value, so they couldn't do anything to him for selling it to the blog (or giving it, or whatever).
A good summary of photographers' rights - by an attorney - can be found here. Notice that, even if you are trespassing, you can photograph anything/anyone who does not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" - and an outdoor movie shoot in an urban area definitely qualifies as *not* having that.
mike weber (4:06 PM on Sat Jun 21, 2008)
Hmmm. must have messed up the URL/HTML - link to the PDF is http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf