(NEW YORK) – Vox Media, the company that owns Vox, The Verge and other news sites, is facing a lawsuit for copyright infringement filed by a small, New York-based, digital news and video licensing company.
In a federal lawsuit filed on Feb. 21, Freedom News TV (FNTV) claims that Vox Media and The Verge used a still image on The Verge website without permission or authorization from the licensing company. The image was taken from a video that FNTV recorded of a group of NYPD police officers surrounding a New York City residence while attempting to make an arrest at a protest from early summer 2020, according to the suit.
FNTV states that the video was created with the intention of being commercially used for public distribution. It says it submitted and received copyright registration for the video on August 14, 2020 and noticed the alleged copyright violation by Vox about a week later.
According to the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the video image of the protest was “selected, copied, stored, and displayed” without a license or permission.
FNTV is seeking unspecified monetary damages to be determined by the court and a trial by jury.
Vox Media did not respond to a request for comment from The Click.