from the troll-defeated dept
It’s been a good while since we’ve had an old-fashioned copyright troll nonsense story around here, and boy do we have a doozy for you today. Regular Techdirt readers know that we’ve covered Paul Levy’s work for years—the man who the Washingtonian once dubbed “the web bully’s worst enemy” has been taking down copyright trolls with surgical precision for over a decade. But this latest victory against Prepared Food Photos may be his most complete evisceration yet.
The short version: a copyright troll that has been shaking down small businesses for years with fraudulent claims about its licensing fees just had to pay its own target to make a lawsuit go away. And in the process, Levy has potentially opened the door for hundreds of previous victims to sue for fraud. It’s beautiful. And that’s not even revealing all of the juicy bits.
Let’s dive into the delicious details, courtesy of Levy’s characteristically thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) write-up on the case.
Prepared Food Photos (PFP) has been running a classic copyright troll operation for years. The company would find businesses using stock photos, then send threatening demand letters claiming massive damages based on their supposed “$999 per month minimum” subscription fee. Small businesses, terrified of federal court litigation, would pay up rather than fight.
There was just one problem: it was all a lie.
And somehow, Prepared Food Photos and its copyright trolling partner-in-crime, “CopyCat Legal,” didn’t seem to think anyone would ever discover that during the course of litigation. Oops.
More than two years after Prepared Food Photos sued Pool World in federal court in Spokane Washington, alleging that a retailer had infringed Prepared Food Photos’ copyright in a stock photo of vegetables on a grill, Prepared Food Photos has agreed to pay Pool World for its consent to dismissal of the action. Pool World agreed to keep amount of the payment confidential.
You read that right. The troll had to pay the target to allow it to dismiss the case. You know things are going badly when that’s the result. But it gets so much better.
As I explained in my most recent blog post, the claim of a $999 per month minimum, and hence the argument that Prepared Food Photos was entitled to $11,988 in actual damages for each year of alleged infringement, was a scam. (Indeed, we learned recently that, for a period of time in 2019, PFP was even offering a subscription to its entire database of photos for as little as $29.99 per month, an offer limited to small retailers with no more than three locations)
So, yes, they were claiming a $999 per month minimum while actually charging some customers $29.99? That’s not just aggressive litigation — that’s straight-up fraud.
What makes this case so satisfying is how methodically Levy dismantled PFP’s entire business model through discovery. The company tried every trick in the book to avoid having to produce documents that would expose their lies:
Prepared Food Photos continued to delay the litigation, first through dragged out mediation about which it was never serious, then moving to dismiss the suit while paying only taxable costs, which we successfully opposed on the ground dismissal would deprive Pool World of its entitlement to seek an award of attorney fees. After that motion was denied, Prepared Food Photos stalled on document discovery seeking to show that most of the subscription agreements were entered to settle claims of past infringement. After our motion to compel that discovery was granted, Prepared Food Photos produced financial records that were heavily redacted. The unredacted documents had to be compelled by a motion to enforce the earlier discovery order. Then, on the eve of depositions, they had to be cancelled. the first time because Prepared Food Photos represented that its main witness had had a family crisis that prevented her from traveling, and the second time, three months later, on the ground that its president had been hospitalized. Somehow, there was always a reason why Pool World could not cross-examine PFP’s witnesses.
Classic troll behavior—they’re great at threatening people but terrible when they actually have to defend their claims under oath.
When the documents finally came out, the scope of the fraud became crystal clear, and PFP’s lawyers started to backtrack.
But in meantime, we were able to obtain sufficient discovery to serve a motion for Rule 11 sanctions, which forced Prepared Food Photos to amend its complaint. Initially, Prepared Food Photos initially proposed to amend in a way that maintained its fiction of a $999 per month minimum, see Exhibit AAA in this document, but when we warned PFP’s lawyer that such an amendment would still be susceptible to a Rule 11 motion, PFP amended to drop both the allegation that it had been charging a minimum of $999 per month, and the allegation that its main business was creating fine photographs and licensing access to such photographs.
They had to literally rewrite their complaint to remove the lies. And then they had to deal with some fairly uncomfortable facts in court:
Even though depositions continued to be postponed, our document discovery enabled us to move for summary judgment, showing more than a hundred undisputed facts that painted an unflattering portrait of Prepared Food Photos. These included that (1) most of the work done by Prepared Food Photos employees entailed searching for alleged infringers and making infringement claims, (2) that roughly 95% of Prepared Food Photos’ income comes from threatening and bringing copyright infringement claims, (3) that Prepared Food Photos was not authoring any new photographs – in other words, that Prepared Food Photos is a classic copyright troll.
The undisputed facts also established that Prepared Food Photos had been securing this enforcement income (4) by lying in demand letters and court filings about its subscription policies and (5) by using deliberately deceptive and coercive statements intended to intimidate the recipients of its demand letters and lawsuits into paying excessive settlements far in excess of the level of damages that Prepared Food Photos could reasonably expect to recover in contested litigation with knowledgeable counsel on the defense side.
They also discovered that Getty Images, which the copyright holder had previously licensed the photos through before beginning this trolling scheme, used to license the photos for next to nothing, demolishing the claims of damages. Forget the $999 per month or even the $29.99 per month. These photos’ licensing value apparently was actually measured in pennies.
In addition, we secured documents from Getty Images, the company that had previously licensed the photo at issue in this case, along with some 4700 other photos, for average license fee of about a dollar per use – of which Prepared Food Photos’ predecessor Adlife received a tiny fraction, as little as twelve cents. THIS was the lost license fee that Prepared Food Photos would properly be awarded should the case go to trial.
So their entire business model was based on lies and intimidation. It’s quite something how copyright trolls always turn out to be even sleazier and more problematic than they first appear.
The financial comparison from when they were licensing things normally to when they began shaking small businesses down is pretty damn stark:
These documents afforded some spectacular numerical comparisons. Over the course of six years from 2010 to 2016, Adlife received slightly more than $11,000 per year in total income from Getty Images for licensing 4700 photos (among them the Grilled Vegetable Image at issue in this case), but in 2023 alone PFP bullied a single company named “Healthy’s” into paying $10,000 to settle a single infringement claim for use of the Grilled Vegetable Photo. And although the documentation we secured in discovery showed that Prepared Food Photos was making roughly $50,000 per year in subscription income – most of it from subscriptions obtained as part of settlements of claims for past infringement – it was garnering far more in infringement settlements, nearly two million dollars per year once CopyCat Legal had begun masterminding its enforcement strategy.
One settlement for a single photo netted them almost as much as they legitimately earned in a year from licensing thousands of photos. That’s some business model.
When Levy filed for summary judgment, PFP realized they were screwed:
At this point, Prepared Food Photos blinked. An adverse ruling on the statute of limitations would have made Pool World the prevailing party, triggering a possible application for an award of attorney fees in a very large amount. But a ruling on Pool World’s damages argument would arguably have been even more threatening to Prepared Foods Photos, because a determination that its argument for damages in the tens of thousands of dollars per infringement was improper as a matter of law could have been cited as res judicata in all future cases, endangering the basis for its revenue model.
They couldn’t risk a court ruling that would destroy their entire scam operation. So they did what bullies always do when confronted by someone who fights back: they folded and agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to get Pool Worlds to agree to let them dismiss the case (with prejudice, of course). The only concession PFP was able to get was that the amount they paid remains secret.
But in the end, Pool World, the small business PFP tried to shake down, ended up making them pay for the privilege of walking away.
This isn’t just one victory — it’s potentially opened the floodgates for all of PFP’s previous victims:
Third, now that the falsity of its claims about a supposed $999 minimum subscription fee have been exposed, Prepared Food Photos is potentially vulnerable to countersuits by the companies that were tricked into paying large settlements by the false statements in demand letters about PFP’s subscription minimum. Section 164 of the Restatement of Contracts provides that a contract that is procured by fraud can be voidable at the option of the defrauded party, and now that we know that PFP was lying to the many businesses that received the CopycatLegal demand letters about the facts of its subscription agreements, it seems quite possible that businesses that paid many thousands of dollars to avoid being sued for using a photo whose market value was only a few dollars may well be able to void their settlement agreements, then dare PFP to sue them and face the same result as in Pool World, WeNeedaVacation or Jaber.
Translation: every business that paid them based on their fraudulent claims about subscription fees could potentially get their money back and sue for more.
Moreover, inspection of the CopyCat Legal ledgers shows that there were several hundred such victims, and the number whose settlement payment was $11,988 shows that they must have been influenced by the lie about a $999 per month minimum fee (known to PFP to have been false all along, and known to CopyCat Legal to have been false once it produced the subscription agreements in discovery during the fall of 2023). And, because there was a common scheme to defraud – virtually the same letters were transmitted on more than two thousand different times – a lawsuit might well be brought as a class action.
This could get very expensive for PFP very quickly.
Of course, when your reputation becomes too toxic even for the copyright troll business, what do you do? Rebrand!
Since the beginning of this calendar year, Prepared Food Photos has not filed a single infringement lawsuit. Instead, about two dozen suits over infringement of photos in the PFP database have been filed by a company named Rockefeller Photos, and indeed I have seen a number of CopyCat Legal demand letters over such infringements sent in the name of Rockefeller Photos. Although the complaints in these cases recite that Rockefeller Photos represents the interests of a number of photograph owners, so far as I have seen, Prepared Food Photos is the only such company. It appears that Joel Albrizio, the owner of PFP, is also the owner of Rockefeller Photos, and similarly the officers of PFP are the officers of Rockefeller Photos.
It is not clear why Rockefeller Photos has been created, but it is my guess that the stench of PFP’s reputation as a copyright troll has become so great that Rockefeller Photos is an attempt to create a new persona without the same reputational baggage. In the circumstances, all of the defenses that potentially apply to PFP will apply to Rockefeller Photos as well
Levy notes how this reminds him of the infamous Righthaven copyright troll whose attempt to game the copyright system by effectively selling a bare right to sue collapsed so badly its owners had to sell the copyrights to one of the publications they had sued to pay for their own legal fees.
Believe it or not, but there’s even more to this story that I didn’t include here. Levy recounts the details of two other cases involving PFP that go pretty badly as well, including a PFP representative falling apart during cross-examination, where she has to repeatedly admit to “mistakes” in the declaration she signed under oath. My favorite bit of that transcript:
Q. Now, ma’am, in that document, you indicated that there were — and I’m going to read it — “For any image,” and then you put in parentheses, “(including the 16 at issue in this lawsuit),” comma, “the plaintiff photographer spent hours specializing lighting, equipment and take dozens if not hundreds of images.” We’re not talking about 16 images. We’re talking about one photograph of a pork chop; right?
A. Correct.
Q. But you indicated in this affidavit that there were 16 different images that are at issue in this lawsuit, did you not?
A. There was an inadvertent six.
Q. Pardon?
A. There was an inadvertent six that was included.
Q. But — but it’s written S-I-X-T-E-E-N. It’s not inadvertent to write S-I-X — S-I-X-T-E-E-N, is it?
A. No. It was an error. It’s never been disputed that there’s only one image involved.
This is the kind of Perry Mason moment litigators dream about. She tried to claim she accidentally added a “6” to turn “1” into “16” in her sworn declaration, apparently forgetting that “SIXTEEN” was written out in full. When you’re caught lying under oath about basic facts in your own case, that’s usually a sign your litigation strategy has some problems.
While Levy (and the other lawyers who helped him, including Phil Malone at Stanford’s Juelsgaard Legal Clinic and Steve Kirby) deserve enormous credit for this masterpiece of litigation, as Levy points out, the real heroes here were Pool World, which could have easily folded rather than fight:
But the real hero of this defense is Pool World. It could easily have paid a small tribute to resolve this case, but its owner and its management were committed to defending this case to the hilt, hoping to save other small businesses from the sort of bullying to which Prepared Food Photos was trying to subject it. From my very first conversation with them, it was clear to me that they and I were on the same page about why this case was worth doing from a public interest perspective. An affidavit from business manager Pat Flynn explained Pool World’s motivations in this case, including the decision not to refer the case to their insurance company lest Prepared Food Photos be paid off in their company’s name. Pool World’s leaders never flinched when they had to devote extensive staff time to discovery responses, or paying expert witness fees and, prospectively, paying for its lawyers’ travel expenses and deposition costs. They read every paper before it was filed to ensure accuracy.
There’s an under-discussed tidbit in there that reveals a key part of the troll business model: Many legal bullies rely on the fact that almost any company they sue will make a claim with their insurance company, and they’re betting on insurance companies’ risk-averse calculus favoring quick settlements over costly litigation.
This explains why the legal trolling business model is so lucrative and persistent. It’s not just preying on small businesses’ lack of legal sophistication — it’s systematically exploiting insurance companies’ short-sighted willingness to keep feeding the trolls rather than fighting back. Pool World’s decision to explicitly avoid their insurance and fight on principle breaks this cycle.
But this is what it takes to stop copyright trolls — someone willing to stand up and fight, even when it would be cheaper to just pay the extortion fee.
Levy also notes that copyright trolls rely on recipients of their shakedown letters rolling over and just paying up, because copyright trolls are bullies, and bullies generally don’t want fair fights.
Either way, Levy’s story here is a masterclass in how to destroy a copyright troll operation. Through meticulous discovery work, Levy didn’t just win one case, he potentially dismantled an entire fraudulent business model and created a roadmap for hundreds of previous victims to get justice.
And in the end, watching a copyright troll have to pay its own target to make a case go away? That’s the kind of poetic justice that makes all the other frustrating copyright stories worth enduring.
Well played.
Filed Under: copyright, copyright trolls, fraud, licensing, lies, paul levy, photos
Companies: copycat legal, pool world, prepared food photos, rockefeller photos
