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June 2018
"PROTECT YOURSELF"
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....now that Influencers are earning commissions!
Influencers are Stealing Imagery
Los
Angeles-based Nita Batra filed suit in a California federal court this week,
alleging that PopSugar “decided to
capitalize on the influencers’ social media following by copying and posting
thousands of influencers’ Instagram images, as well as their Instagram profile
photos and bio line information on its own website without authorization.”
Hundreds
of ‘influencers’ may be able to join a new lawsuit filed against PopSugar.
PopSugar,
the fashion and celebrity news website, made headlines this spring for
allegedly stealing the images of one of the new ‘influencers’, and posting them
on its website in furtherance of a “massive infringement” scheme.
According
to her multi-million dollar complaint, Batra, who boasts a following of 215,000
on Instagram, alleges that, in mid-April, PopSugar swiped thousands of influencers’ Instagram imagery to
create shoppable pages and individual influencer “subpages” on its own website.
Batra
claims that PopSugar also “removed the
products’ affiliate links.” Batra has a partnership with content platform/shopping
discovery app ‘rewardStyle/LIKEtoKNOW.it.’ This
app enables influencers to earn
commissions if their followers purchase any of the linked products.
In
place of the rewardStyle/LIKEtoKNOW.it affiliate links, PopSugar allegedly inserted its own affiliate links,
pointing to ShopStyle, a competing shopping platform that PopSugar previously
owned, and was using at the time of the acts alleged. As a result, PopSugar actively “diverted commissions from the sales of
products featured in the influencers’ images to itself … in order to monetize
the content for its own benefit.”
“When
caught, PopSugar’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Sugar, attempted to minimize
PopSugar’s culpability,” Batra’s complaint states, “tweeting on April 17, 2018,
that the misappropriated pages were ‘intended for internal use only, but were
mistakenly left open, albeit hidden from search engine indexing and social
media.’”
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