Civil Case (Tel Aviv) 34457-02-24 Lounge Systems Ltd. v. Yedioth Ahronoth Ltd.

Introduction

1. Friday, December 31, 2021, Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper On the last page, a spacious photo of the famous clock in Jaffa is published with a portrait of the watchmaker who is claimed to be buying the watch. A photographer from Yedioth Ahronoth who arrived at the scene to cover the incident was unable to activate the drone to photograph from a height, and asked the plaintiff's employee, who held a license to work at height, to photograph the clock with the watchmaker for him.  Who owns the copyright in the photo? This is the question that needs to be decided in this proceeding.
2. I have before me a monetary claim in the amount of NIS 100,000 concerning the plaintiffs' demand to receive compensation from the defendant for journalistic coverage, which was claimed to infringe the plaintiffs' copyright and constitutes an infringement of their property.  The work that is the subject of the procedure is a photograph of the famous clock in Jaffa, with the watchmaker Susanna Kaufman standing next to it.
3. Plaintiff 1 is Lounge Systems Ltd., an international company operating in the field of time and display systems (hereinafter: "Plaintiff 1").
4. Plaintiff 2 is an employee of Plaintiff 1, a project manager and time and clock systems technician, who was part of the plaintiff's team and took part in the photo photographyevent that is the subject of the proceeding (hereinafter: "Plaintiff 2").
5. The defendant is Yedioth Ahronoth Ltd., a common and well-known journalistic organization that covered the famous clock repair event in Jaffa (hereinafter: "the defendant").
6. The lawsuit concerns a photograph published in the defendant's newspaper regarding the repair of the famous clock located in the clock tower in the city of Jaffa. In the article, it was noted that the watchmaker Susanna, pictured next to the watch, was the one who managed to fix a complex malfunction in the watch, so that it was back working properly.  The photo was taken at  height by plaintiff 2, after technical failures were identified that prevented the defendant's photographer from taking the photo using a drone, as he had planned.
7. At the center of the lawsuit is the plaintiffs' claim that the defendant infringed the defendants' copyright in photographing the watch, when it published the image on various platforms on its behalf without obtaining permission for any use and without giving credit to the plaintiffs. The defendant, on the other hand, claims that the ownership of the photograph belongs to it and that there was no infringement when the copyright did not belong to the plaintiffs.  The defendant also claims that this is a single publication and that immediately upon receipt of the plaintiffs' demand, she agreed in her fairness and courtesy to add the plaintiffs' name under the photograph on the website.
8. It should be noted that this claim is a second incarnation of a previous claim that was heard in the Haifa Magistrate's Court (37362-02-22) and was deleted at the request of plaintiff 1. The claim before me was initially filed for the sum of NIS 300,000, and during the course of the proceeding, the plaintiffs decided to reduce the amount to  NIS 100,000.
9. There is no dispute between the parties that plaintiff 1 was the one who was responsible for repairing the clock, and that in the original publication of the article no credit was given to plaintiff 2 for the photograph or to plaintiff 1 for the repair of the clock itself. The dispute between the parties lies in the question of who actually belongs to the copyright in the photograph and whether the case before us is sufficient to obligate the defendant to compensate the plaintiffs for the alleged infringement of these rights.
10. These disputes are at the basis of the claim before me , and I will decide them in the framework of the judgment.

The parties' arguments