IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Storm footage lands Reuters in hot water, (Oct 17, 2024)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The news service allegedly purloined dramatic video of Hurricane Beryl and licensed it out to a weather channel affiliate.

The Reuters news service deliberately purloined dramatic video of Hurricane Beryl plowing into a Caribbean island and licensed it out to its partner The Weather Channel, a new complaint asserts. The copyright infringement complaint, filed in the federal court for Manhattan, alleges that even after Reuters was denied permission from the videographer who shot the footage, it gladly accepted the same footage from an overseas partner who had itself obtained the footage illicitly (Global Weather Productions LLC v. Reuters News & Media, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-07828-UA (S.D.N.Y. filed Oct. 15, 2024)).

The entity at the core of this lawsuit is WxChasing, an online news services that, in the words of its publicity materials, “follows award winning videographer Brandon Clement around the globe in pursuit of Mother Nature’s wrath.” Some of the most popular links on its site are videos shot by drone of tornado and hurricane damage in Kansas and Louisiana in 2022, as well as what the site bills as “insane video” of a tornado that kicked up a huge dust cloud and hit a wind farm in Texas.

The particular video at issue in this case was shot by Clement and a colleague in the Caribbean island of Grenada earlier this year. The two videographers set up in Grenada on June 30 just before Hurricane Beryl made a direct hit on the island as a Category 4 hurricane. The video they took, titled “Hurricane Beryl Landfall Carriacou raw power 4k - Eye wall of category 4” was published on YouTube and also previewed on Clement’s X feed.

But WxChasing was not the only entity interested in the video. On July 1 and again on July 3, the complaint asserts, Reuters contacted Clement via direct messaging on X and asked for permission to rebroadcast it. Clement denied him every time, the lawsuit alleged. But that did not deter Reuters, the lawsuit claims. At around the same time that Clement was denying Reuters access to the footage, a Tbilisi, Georgia-based partner of Reuters named ViralBear was getting permission to use the footage from another X user—one who had uploaded the footage, without permission from Clement, to his own feed. From there, the complaint alleges, ViralBear showed the purloined footage on its own website and YouTube channel, while Reuters licensed it out to The Weather Network—which ran it with credit to Reuters.

The lawsuit brings a single count of direct copyright infringement against Reuters (and its parent company, Thompson Reuters). The complaint takes pains to note that Reuters should be required to pay statutory damages as a willful infringer in light of its obvious awareness of “the importance of identifying and verifying the owner of a video or photo, obtaining permission from the owner to use their work, specifically explaining how the work will be used, and giving proper attribution.”

The Case is No. 1:24-cv-07828-UA.

Attorneys: Renee Jennifer Aragona (Sanders Law Group) for Global Weather Productions LLC.

Companies: Global Weather Productions LLC; Reuters News & Media, Inc.; Thomson Reuters US LLC

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