Legal Exposure: This One Rock Music Photographer Has Filed More Than 50 Copyright Lawsuits

Neil Zlozower, a veteran rock photographer who’s snapped images of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, is suing Warner Records over a Facebook post featuring a picture of Tom Petty — the latest of more than 50 lawsuits the litigious photog has filed over the past decade.

In a case filed in Los Angeles federal court, Zlozower accuses Warner of infringing the copyright to his photo, which depicts ’70s-era Petty sitting in front of a record player. His lawyers claim the image was posted in 2020 to the official Facebook page for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, which Warner allegedly controls.

“Defendant has not implemented adequate internal policies to verify copyright ownership before content use, indicating a gross negligence in legal compliance, which is essential for a company with defendant’s reach, capabilities, and level of sophistication,” Zlozower’s lawyer Craig Sanders writes in the July 23 complaint.

Warner’s alleged failure to employ such copyright protections indicates “de facto willful infringement” by the company, the lawsuit claims — a key accusation, since under U.S. copyright law “willful” violations can result in increased damages of up to $150,000 per work.

A spokesman for Warner did not return a request for comment on the lawsuit’s allegations.

The case is hardly the first for Zlozower, who has also photographed Prince, Van Halen and countless other bands and artists over a decades-long career. Since 2016, court records show he’s filed a whopping 57 copyright lawsuits against a wide range of defendants in federal courts around the country, demanding monetary damages over the alleged unauthorized use of his photographs.

Many of his cases have targeted media companies, including CBS, Buzzfeed and Vice. But he’s also twice sued Universal Music Group, once over an image of Elvis Costello and another time over a photo of Guns N’ Roses. A different case targeted Ticketmaster, accusing the Live Nation unit of using an image of Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. In 2019, Zlozower sued the guitar maker Gibson over claims that the company used a shot of Eddie Van Halen without permission.

Copyright lawsuits over the unauthorized use of photographs on the internet are extremely common, with hundreds filed in the federal courts each year. The photographers and attorneys who bring them say it’s their only real recourse against rampant online theft of their intellectual property, often by sophisticated companies that should know better.

“Photographers who are serious about protecting their copyright have no other choice but to file suit in [court] when an infringer refuses to negotiate,” says David C. Deal, an attorney who represents photographers in such cases. “Photographers are the overwhelming losers in the digital age because they are properly compensated at a fraction of the rate at which their intellectual property is copied and used by others.”

But critics have questioned the tactics of some particularly litigious photographers and their attorneys, suggesting they’re using litigation itself as a business model — namely, by leveraging the threat of huge damages and prohibitive costs of to win as many small “nuisance” settlements as possible.

In 2019, a federal judge sharply criticized David Oppenheimer, a North Carolina photographer who filed more than 170 such lawsuits. As detailed by The Assembly, Judge Martin Reidinger cited Oppenheimer’s big demands and high volume of cases before saying that he “appears to be using the copyright laws as a source of revenue, rather than as redress for legitimate injury.”

A year earlier, a New York federal judge used harsher language about Richard Liebowitz, a Long Island attorney who filed thousands of such photo infringement cases. Judge Denise Cote labeled the lawyer a “copyright troll” — which she defined as someone who aims to win “quick” settlements that are “priced just low enough” that it makes financial sense to simply “pay the troll rather than defend the claim.”

“As evidenced by the astonishing volume of filings coupled with an astonishing rate of voluntary dismissals and quick settlements in Mr. Liebowitz’s cases in this district, it is undisputable that Mr. Liebowitz is a copyright troll,” the judge wrote in her 2018 decision.

In November 2021, Liebowitz was suspended from practicing law in New York over a pattern of misconduct, including “behavior that made a mockery of orderly litigation processes.” Earlier this year, he was disbarred by the state for failing to comply with court orders and making false statements.

According to federal court records, Liebowitz represented Zlozower in the vast majority of his copyright cases until 2021. In 2018, his firm filed nine lawsuits on behalf of the photographer, including one against Spotify over an image of Mötley Crüe on the band’s artist page. In the year 2019 alone, Liebowitz’s firm filed 14 more cases for Zlozower, including one against famed indie record store Amoeba Music.

According to Deal, many photographers face an “impossible position” on the modern internet: Allow for-profit businesses to exploit their works for free, or “insist on being properly compensated” and risk being labeled a “troll” when they take action in court. But even within that context of mass infringement, Deal says, Zlozower’s volume of litigation seems unusually high.

“The idea of one photographer filing an average of 5-6 cases per year strikes me as excessive,” Deal says, saying his own firm will only typically sue in a “very small percentage of cases” after exhausting every other option.

One of Zlozower’s earliest cases was filed against Mötley Crüe itself. Represented by Liebowitz, he accused the band in September 2016 of creating t-shirts and other concert merch for its 2014 “Final Tour” that were emblazoned with photos he had snapped of Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and other members during Crüe’s 1980s heyday. But unlike many such defendants, the band actually fought back.

During two years of litigation, attorneys for Mötley Crüe argued that the band had already paid decades earlier for the right to use those images, and that it had “continued to use them without objection ever since.” Crüe also filed its own countersuit, accusing Zlozower of infringing their trademarks and likenesses by using the band’s name and images to sell books and prints: “Zlozower never requested, nor received, consent to sell photographs depicting the likenesses of the band members of Mötley Crüe.”

But in 2020, the case against Crüe ended like many of Zlozower’s have: in a confidential settlement and the voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit, without a final ruling on the merits. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed in court filings.

Zlozower and his current attorney, Sanders, did not return requests for comment from Billboard.

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