Photography company Corbis Corp. is suing Amazon.com (among others) for copyright infringement and violation of the DMCA; it is seeking damages and injunctive relief. Corbis holds the copyright for a variety of celebrity photographs and does business by licensing these images to its customers. It claims that Amazon.com violated Corbis's copyright by displaying the infringing images on its website and on its subsidiary IMDB.com. It further accuses Amazon.com of vicarious copyright infringement for allowing independent vendors to offer and sell unlicensed Corbis images through Amazon.com's Marketplace, Auctions, and zShops. Finally, Corbis claims that Amazon.com violated the DMCA by removing Corbis's watermarks from some of the images.
Amazon.com has responded by claiming that the only infringers are the third-party retailers and that Amazon.com merely links to them or offers them a forum in which to sell their infringing products. Thus, Amazon.com is claiming that it is protected from liability under the DMCA's "safe harbor" provision. Nevertheless, Amazon.com has removed the offending photographs and vendors.
Read more about this lawsuit in Infoworld, News.com, Reuters, and InternetNews.