Image by Miami New TimesWell, it was bound to happen eventually. One of my personal favorite’s in the celebrity blogging qord, the self proclaimed queen of all media, Perez Hilton, has been slapped with a $7.5-million lawsuit.
Perez Hilton, like the vast majority of other blogs, gets all of his images from various different sites online, one of which is X17, who just happened to be a paparazzi agency. It used to be that the guys at X17 didn’t mind if people used their pictures on blogs, and then they started to watermark all their pictures, but still allowed them to be used; however, just recently, they have changed their minds yet again, and have now decided any publicity gained from the use of their watermarked images wasn’t enough, and now they’re charging for people to make use of their pictures. Alas, there is only one problem with that situation, they’re still posting all their picture on their OWN website, for everyone to see! If you post pictures on the internet, you have to be willing to accept that fact that at one point or another, someone else is likely to make use of them. I’m afraid that’s just how it works, and as much as X17 wants to change the world in that respect, they don’t stand a chance.
The thing that gets to me the most about this entire situation is the fact that X17 and a hand full of other paparazzi agencies have banded together to pick out and target Perez Hilton alone. Hundreds, if not thousands of other blogs and sites with significant visitors use images from these agencies as well, alas, these agencies don’t see to care about those sites. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that PerezHilton.com is one of, if not the single largest celebrity gossip blog online? Perez is the face of the gossip blogging world and has been featured on just about every TV show and in just about every magazine in North America. Whether you like him or not, he’s the highest profile celebrity blogger out there, and his site sees well over 3-million unique visitors a day because of it. This past Thursday he cracked the 4-million mark and had roughly 4.4-million unique visitors. That is a huge achievement for anyone, let alone a celebrity gossip blogger!
The only reason X17 and the likes are singling our Perez is because he IS the face of the celebrity blogging world, his site DOES get the highest traffic and the free publicity garnered by suing/threatening/annoying him is substantial! My hat goes off to X17 and the other pap agencies that are going after Perez, you’re making one hell of a PR push. Funny how the paparazzi agencies suddenly develop ethics and a set of morals when PR is involved. To bad it’s not fooling anyone.
