Updated July 31, 2006

The Corbis photo agency has filed a lawsuit against TemplateMonster.com and Ultravertex.com, web sites it claims are engaged in large-scale piracy of stock photos. The lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in the Southern District of Florida, seeks $109 million in damages.

Corbis accuses TemplateMonster of selling web site templates that include Corbis stock photos, thereby infringing on Corbis's copyrights and encouraging customers to do the same. It also accuses Ultravertex of running a stock photo subscription service – priced at $49.95 for a six-month membership – that re-licensed Corbis photographs without authorization. In total, 623 Corbis images were available through the sites, the lawsuit says.

TemplateMonster has been widely known to stock agency lawyers for some time, but no one so far had been able to track down any party who would take responsibility for it, says attorney Nancy Wolff, who does work for the Picture Archive Council of America.

"It's been a thorn in the stock industry's side for a while," she says.

The lawsuit lumps TemplateMonster and Ultravertext together, along with several other alleged partner companies, but TemplateMonster said in a statement that the companies are not the same entity.

Corbis claims the businesses are all owned by Igor Lognikov, who it says is a resident of Miami Beach.

Lognikov is fighting the lawsuit. In court filings, his attorney, Richard Stuart Ross, says his client's companies had no role in the infringement, and Corbis's links between the companies are false. Ross says he represents TemplateMonster.com and some of the other companies listed as defendants, but not Ultravertex. According to the filings, Lognikov is a foreign national who resides in "the former Soviet Union."

On July 6, a judge granted a preliminary injunction freezing the companies' assets and ordering the sites to take down all the images owned by Corbis. (The order also specifically instructed Lognikov not to sell his 2006 BMW 650i, a sports car that retails for more than $70,000.)

In a statement to PDN on July 31, TemplateMonster says Corbis is trying to use the courts to save its money-losing business. "We hope that the court will make the right decision and not fall under the influence of this army of lawyers that use Corbis for achieving their greedy goals," the statement said. A TemplateMonster representative declined a request for a telephone interview with David Braun, who is listed on the web site as the company's CEO.

On the TemplateMonster web site, a message dated July 3 said the company has severed its ties with Ultravertex because Ultravertex was not responding to customer complaints. "Template Monster strongly recommends to all of its clients not to use any images from Ultravertex.com," the message said. TemplateMonster.com appeared to be fully functional, even after the injunction.

By contrast, most of Ultravertex.com seemed to be offline following the injunction. A message on the home page mentioned the lawsuit and apologized for any inconvenience. "We request that all of our customers at this time refrain from using any photos that have been obtained from our database until all issues relating to this problem are sorted out and handled in an appropriate manner," the message said. The message referred potential customers to Corbis.

Tracking down the people responsible for TemplateMonster and Ultravertex required the services of a private investigator, says Corbis senior corporate counsel David Weiskopf. The web site domains were registered to phony addresses, according to the lawsuit.

With the lawsuit, Corbis attached a complicated flow chart showing how it thinks the companies are interconnected, tracing them to Igor Lognikov of Miami Beach and several residents of Brooklyn, N.Y., who are not named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The judge granted permission for the lawsuit to be served to Lognikov via e-mail, something that is extremely unusual.

TemplateMonster.com first came to the attention of Corbis's legal team this winter, Weiskopf says.

As a matter of routine, Corbis and other stock services use computer software – some proprietary and some from outside vendors – to crawl the web in search of infringing images. When they find cases of infringement, the agencies typically contact web site owners and ask them to pay for the use of the images.

Corbis began noticing cases of infringement in which web site owners thought they had legitimately licensed the images. It turned out the web site owners had obtained the images through TemplateMonster or Ultravertex.

In preparing the lawsuit, Corbis decided against sending a cease-and-desist letter to TemplateMonster and Ultravertex. "Our belief is that if they had the heads-up, they would dive even deeper underground," Weiskopf says.

Corbis's lawsuit accuses TemplateMonster and its related companies of copyright infringement, of stripping images of their credit information, and of racketeering.

In Lognikov's court filings, his attorney argues that Corbis does not own the copyright to the images – its contributing photographers do – and so it has no right to sue for infringement. (Weiskopf declined to say how many of the images in question were actually owned by Corbis and how many were contributed by third parties.)

Corbis says it believes the following companies are owned by or under the control of Lognikov: Artvertex, Ultravertex, TemplateMonster.com, Template Tuning, Template-Help.com, Template-Delivery.com, MyTemplateStorage.com, Inverse-Logic, Site2You.com, Callaway Alliance, Colman Alliance and Web Design Libraries.

Ross, in court filings, says he represents all of those companies except Ultravertex, Inverse-Logic, Colman Alliance.

Weiskopf says if Corbis prevails in the lawsuit, it will return a percentage of the money it wins to the photographers whose work was infringed, as is its standard practice.

"I can't wait for the outcome of this," says Patrick Donehue, vice president and chief photographer for Corbis. "A lot of people have been aware of this... and very few people have been able to make traction on this."

In its statement, however, TemplateMonster says the lawsuit will probably be thrown out.

"The statement of Corbis that TM and Ultravertex are one entity has absolutely in no way any foundation at all and most probably will be the reason that this lawsuit against TM will be thrown out of court," the company says.

Related legal documents
Corbis's complaint, June 28 (2mb PDF file)
Judge's order, July 6 (.6mb PDF file)
Defendant's motion, July 18 (.6mb PDF file)