Lip Service: Photog Sues Hip L.A. Restaurant for Copyright Infringement

Usually when a photographer sues someone over copyright infringement, you end up reading about it in photo industry trade newspapers and Websites. But when National Geographic staffer Jodi Cobb sued the Geisha House restaurant in Los Angeles for using her photographs without permission, word of the legal action appeared on the Website of The Hollywood Reporter, a mainstay of the entertainment industry.
     That might be because the restaurant is one of the town’s hottest nightspots. Or because one of its owners was the winner of the CBS reality TV show Big Brother. Or maybe it was because one of the investors in the restaurant is actor Ashton Kutcher.
     Whatever the reason, the case should also be of interest to photographers around the country, simply because it illustrates how cavalierly the notion of copyright is treated by many people today.

Cobb’s suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles in September, holds that the restaurant improperly featured pictures she made in her landmark documentary project about the lives and rituals of Japan’s geisha. That project, undertaken in the early 1990s, resulted in a book Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art (Knopf, 1995.) The cover of the book featured what may be Cobb’s most famous picture—her shot of a geisha’s lips.
      That image, she says, was used by the restaurant for its signage on Hollywood Boulevard, as well as on business cards, matchbooks, menus and chopstick holders. Other images from the book were hung in the restaurant’s interior spaces, she says.
      In a recent interview, Cobb said she first heard about Geisha House when someone from the National Geographic’s image sales department emailed her to see if she had authorized the use of the photographs. “I didn’t know what they were talking about,” says Cobb. Shortly after that, one of her former assistants, now an executive at the Discovery Channel, emailed Cobb to say that her images were indeed hanging in the restaurant. “She had worked with me on the geisha project, so she knew the pictures very well,” says Cobb. “She was sitting right in the restaurant, looking at them and emailing me on her Blackberry.”
      Cobb determined that her gallery in Los Angeles, the Apex Fine Arts gallery, had not sold the prints to the restaurant, then went to the Geisha House’s Website, which, she says, “basically was exhibiting a large part of my book.”
    She then contacted Bert Fields, one of the biggest entertainment lawyers in L.A. “He wrote the restaurant a letter telling them to cease and desist.” Cobb later hired attorney Eve Wagner to represent her.
      According to Cobb’s suit, the unapproved use of her work extended beyond the restaurant itself. One of the restaurant’s owners, Michael Malin, wore a Geisha House T-shirt (featuring what appeared to be Cobb’s image of the geisha lips) while competing on CBS’s Big Brother: All-Stars. (Malin’s prize for winning that contest: $500,000.)
      In addition, the restaurant itself was used as the setting for a scene in the hit HBO series Entourage. “In the show, you could see the lips picture in the background throughout the whole scene,” says Cobb.
      The suit says that the restaurant’s use of the imagery damages their intrinsic value: “Instead of being associated with her journalistic entrée into the secret world of the Geisha, where women were photographed only after giving their permission, Ms. Cobb’s photographs are now associated with Geisha House restaurant, where one of their tag lines is ‘This is Sex: This is the Geisha House.’”
      Another co-owner of the Geisha House, Lonnie Moore, told the Hollywood Reporter that the two sides in the dispute had spent seven hours trying to mediate a settlement. “I wish it didn’t have to come down to this; I’m not a litigious kind of guy,” Moore said. By way of defense, Moore said the lips photograph featured in the restaurant is not actually Cobb’s. He said the restaurant wanted to use Cobb’s photograph, but “she wanted too much money.” Instead, he noted, the restaurant created its own version of Cobb’s picture. “It’s similar, but different,” Moore said. 
      Is copying someone’s photograph a defense against copyright infringement? “Absolutely not,” says Cobb’s attorney, Eve Wagner. “In fact, that is precisely what the copyright laws protect against.” In any case, Cobb says she had a computer expert at National Geographic compare her image against the geisha lips image used on the restaurant’s logo. “They’re virtually identical,” she says.
     Wagner says there is a troubling issue underlying Cobb’s lawsuit. “What we’re seeing is that a whole generation has grown up thinking that everything out there is just there for the taking,” she says. The sanctity of copyright, she says, has not been instilled in people who have come of age in a time when information and art are assumed to be available for free on the Web, or when bloggers feel entitled to copy any picture from any publication for their own purposes.
     The odd thing is that such an attitude would surface in one of the hippest places in Hollywood, where movie moguls toss all night worrying about DVD pirates and music executives lament the good old days before Napster. It’s no wonder that the Los Angeles Boy Scouts now offer a new Respect Copyright Activity Patch.
      There may be a silver lining for Cobb. First, there are some potentially big targets involved in her suit. But on a more philosophical level, there are rewards as well—at least according to Geisha House co-owner Moore. As reported by the defamer.com, Moore thinks that he has helped Cobb’s career by copying and repurposing her image. “It actually make her more well known,” he said. “It’s the ultimate respect and we’re showing reverence for her. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.”
      He may end up showing Cobb another kind of respect—the kind that comes from writing a big, fat check.
—David Schonauer

Comments

[jenna lariviere]

this page is acctually a really good page to read about the geisha lips there is a difference of the different kinds of lips. "good job"