IPA - Corporate Injustice: An Interview with Penny Gentieu †


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Corporate Injustice: An Interview with Penny Gentieu †
Case Commentary by Stephen Filler, Esq.
by Brad Holland

In January 2000, photographer Penny Gentieu sued Getty Images for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary responsibility and copyright infringement. †She alleged, among other things, that Getty had licensed her pictures beyond the scope of its authority, infringed her copyrights by art directing other photographers to copy her images and failed to honor their obligation as her agent to market her work properly.

When Gentieu appealed the case to a higher court, Getty proved how a corporation can use the "brute force" of the courts to prevail. †At Getty's request, the judge ordered Gentieu to immediately pay Getty's legal fees of $728,308.23. †Unless she did, Getty demanded that Gentieu surrender to them her photographs, negatives and copyrights. †Faced with financial ruin and the loss of her life's work, Penny Gentieu dropped her appeal.

Recently, she talked about this troubling case with Brad Holland.

Brad Holland: You gave your work to the Tony Stone stock agency, right?†What year was that?

Penny Gentieu: 1993.

BH: And when did Stone sell to Getty?
PG: March 1995.

BH: How long had Stone been around at that point?
PG: It started in England in the sixties and came to Chicago in the late eighties. Then they opened an office in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

BH: So, was Tony Stone a British photographer?
PG: Yes. He changed the stock photo industry. He, along with his daughter, had a lot of respect for photographers and worked with them closely. They had great new ideas about how to present stock. They set the pace. This was in the early 90’s. I had just started with another agency, Black Star, but they weren’t doing that well. They were opening up a commercial division, but it never really flew and so my editor there told me about Tony Stone Images. My Black Star editor loved their catalogues, they were so different and had a fresh approach. So, I contacted Tony Stone.†

BH: So Stone sold to Getty in 1995 and Getty inherited their contract with you?
PG: Yeah, it had a clause that was binding upon, and inured to, any successors.

BH: How long was the contract?
PG: Four years, with a one year automatic renewal every year, unless one party gave notice that they didn’t want to continue.†

BH: Was that a blanket contract or an image-by-image contract?
PG: It was a blanket contract. It covered any pictures you gave them.

BH: Had you been happy with the way Tony Stone handled your work?
PG: Yes, in the early years. Stock was always a good market for me, as an outlet for my existing photos. I never shot with stock in mind, but the market was important to me, since I started out doing more shoots for myself than I did assignments.

BH: †Did Black Star take stock too?
PG: †Yes. Black Star was more editorial, but they were opening up a commercial division. One thing they did that was very good for me, was, they syndicated my pictures to 15 different agencies in Europe. They did really well in Europe. I was with them for two years.

BH: All right. So Getty bought Stone in 1995. How did you respond?
PG: †Well, Tony Stone told us that they wanted an investor to take them forward into the digital future. They said they had many suitors but they picked Getty because Getty liked what Tony Stone was doing. Tony Stone said Getty would stay out of their way and let them do what they were doing. They said not to worry, everything would be fine. Then two guys from Getty would show up at parties.

BH: And do what?
PG: †Well, they were very chummy—so friendly and happy. They promised us this digital future. They sent us newsletters saying, “everything is going to turn into the web soon,” and, “your pictures are going to be on the web.” They were telling the press that. They were telling the stockholders that. It was like, “look out, here it comes.”

BH: So, your contract then would have been up around 1997 right? What happened then? Did you agree to stay on?
PG: Since my contract was self-renewing, we didn’t have to do anything at this point. I was making a lot of money. My pictures were great sellers. I think that year I made $167,000 from Tony Stone. I had been doing better every year, and they had been accepting more and more of my photos.

BH: And you were doing assignment work, too?
PG: Yes. I had a wonderful studio with an active business.

BH: But then in 2000 you filed a lawsuit. What happened between 1997 and 2000?
PG: †I began to notice discrepancies in the bookkeeping. †In 1996 my art director at Tony Stone sent me a market research memo that obviously had been sent to Tony Stone’s other art directors as well, listing pictures they wanted for their files. They had targeted one of my best selling pictures, and said they wanted more like it. They even identified it by the catalog page and location.†

BH: What do you mean they “targeted” it?
PG: †It was on a list the marketing research department sent to art directors at Tony Stone.

BH: Saying, “this is one of our best selling pictures, we need more like this.”
PG: Yes. So I wrote to my art director and said, “I’ll do that, I’ll do that,” you know, trying to be very nice about it. I had always been submitting pictures like that. It was my thing, no one else was making pictures like that. My style was distinctive. No other stock agencies had photos like mine, either. But that was the first hint that something was weird. Then I started noticing cancellations.

BH: What do you mean?
PG: Licenses that had been canceled.

BH: Explain.
PG: Sometimes they’d license a photo, then—two months later, six months later, even a year later—they’d cancel it. I saw one that was canceled two years after it had been licensed. Sometimes they canceled them close to the end of the license period, then reissue the license for more time, but they wouldn’t charge any more money.†

BH: Did you ask them about it?
PG: They’d try to explain away the cancellations by saying they were minor mistakes on the license that had to be corrected, like the spelling of a name or a minor change. I found some like that, but they weren’t the ones I had issues about. And what was so disturbing was that the percentage of cancellations doubled and tripled in some offices. They became very strange.

BH: Was this tied to the beginning and the end of fiscal year?
PG: I think there may have been a few cancellations from when the sales department would boost up their sales, so maybe they would put a sale in and then cancel it a few days or weeks later, but I didn’t pay attention to those. I paid attention to the cancellations that were close to the end of the license period—or months later, because that’s so unusual. From my experience licensing my own photos, I’d had only two cancellations in 18 years, and each one was within a couple of weeks of the sale date. And each one had a good reason.

BH: Let me get this straight. Getty had licensed a picture to an ad agency, say, for six months or a year?†
PG: Yes. And then the licenses were canceled close to the end of the licensing period. Then, sometimes the canceled licenses would be re-issued for an extended period of time, but for no more money.

BH: So you were getting nothing from any of that?
PG: Right. They seemed to be doing favors for their clients at my expense.

BH: You said you noticed other discrepancies?
PG: Yes. My checks were shrinking. From month to month they could vary as much as 25 or 50%, which was pretty unusual. From 1997 to 1998, my net sales went from 167,000 to 133,000. And that’s after I gave them 50% more pictures. Also, in 1997, they sent me a big packet of tear sheets and asked me to change my style.

BH: Tearsheets of other peoples’ work?
PG: †Yes. Magazine tearsheets. Even catalog pages, of their own photographers. They were showing me pictures by their own photographers—saying, Why don’t I do work like that? But why would they want to get me to stop doing my style? It sold so well! It was my thing, it was what interested me about photographing babies. Why should I want to make photographs in any other way than my own style? Why were they pushing me in that direction?†

BH: †Was this coming from art directors or salesmen?
PG: †It was my art director. Finally in May of 1998, she sent me a fax that said, Do these kinds of pictures of babies and kids. They were expensive shoots. They were just not my type of thing. They didn’t fit into my style at all. Three pages of these kinds of photos. Then, on the last page, it said they’d gotten word from London that they don’t want these kinds of pictures from me anymore—babies in silhouette, white backgrounds, developmental babies. I was doing a series of growing babies. I’d been working on it for years. I would track the growth of the baby for over a year, then composite the photos. The fax was like, whoa, they’re telling me right there, they don’t want my style. Period.

BH: Was there any context for this?
PG: Getty had been digitizing their collection, which they used for in-house research. They called it Compass. So instead of going through their trays of transparencies for photo searches for clients, Getty used this database, Compass. Well, one day in July an art director from San Francisco called me. She said she was trying to license a photo of mine that had been on the cover of Time magazine. She said she’d called Tony Stone first, but said they didn’t have it. Well, I knew they did, so I told her to call them back. She did, but Tony Stone still said they couldn’t find it. I gave her the picture number, and they still couldn’t find it. So, finally, I called the researcher who had licensed the cover to Time. She went to the physical files and found it. It seems that somehow in the process of scanning my pictures, the picture number dropped off. So I asked the agency to send me a list of all my pictures that they had in the Compass database. I wanted to check them. And less than 50% of my inventory was in the Compass system. They had been using the database for a year or so, yet less than half my work was in it. I didn’t think that was a very good sign.

BH: Did you ask them for an explanation?
PG: A couple of weeks after that incident, Getty dropped the 1998 contract on us. They were launching their web site in October of that year, and in early August they sent all photographers the new contract. It was over 20 pages long and it was so different from my Tony Stone contract.

BH: In what way?
PG: The word “agent” didn’t appear in it whatsoever. That took away any fiduciary duty they had to us. It took away derivative rights—that meant they’d have a right to make whatever they want out of our pictures. And it gave their clients the right to change our work, too.

BH: Without consulting you?
PG: Right. And the copyright for the resulting derivative image was questionable, too. The contract took away 20% of our commission, reducing our percentage to 40%. They were taking 20% more of our share, just to license the work on the web. And, the contract didn’t have a best efforts clause, and the audit clause was insignificant, saying you could only look at records that were already reported to you anyway. It had a gag clause, so you couldn’t talk to anybody about whatever they deemed confidential — the contract or photo assignments for example.

BH: So, you had been happy with the Tony Stone contract. But suddenly Getty gives you this contract and you had, what, six months to say yes or no?
PG: No. They said I had to sign it right away. They didn’t cancel my existing contract. They just insisted that everybody sign this one before they’d put our photos on the web.†

BH: And the web was where they were now licensing work. So what happened?
PG: A lot of photographers were getting up in arms about it. There was a lot of talk in chat rooms, everywhere. Getty promised us a lump sum payment of all our unpaid license fees—all the way through the date of the contract! A little sweetener to get us to sign.

BH: You mean if you’d sign their bad contract they’d pay you what they already owed you?
PG: That’s right!

BH: Oh good, thank you.
PG: This was one of the reasons why my checks had gotten smaller! They were holding back to give us this lump sum for signing. And another accounting anomaly was that the month they sent us the contract, my check was huge — it had payments for 14 New York office licenses from January 1997. I checked with other photographers and they had the same thing. New York License fees, withheld for about 18 months, puffing up our August 1998 checks. Money withheld for a year and a half, paid the month the contract was issued, apparently to make us feel like we were doing so much better, so we’d want to sign the contract.

BH: So, did you sign?
PG: No I didn’t sign anything. I thought about it a lot, talked to my lawyer about it.

BH: What was his advice?
PG: He said if I signed it, I would never forgive myself.

BH: Okay. So you didn’t sign it and still didn’t forgive yourself.
PG: Right.

BH: Entering the whirlpool.
PG: Well, most of the photographers signed it. What could you do? Getty had our pictures locked up and a lot of these photographers depended on Getty for their sole income. For me, I felt I was doing well. I didn’t depend on Getty, even though it was a lot of money. I started working on my website—babystock.com—to market the pictures that Getty didn’t represent. I could license this work myself, and carry on with my studio work. I felt like I could make that transition, but a lot of these guys couldn’t because Getty’s all they did.

BH: So, when you refused to sign, did Getty give you your work back and say, nice knowing you?
PG: No, they still didn’t cancel my contract.†

BH: But did they honor it?
PG: No. They took my pictures off the web. They had my pictures on the web for about six months. I had joined a group that was trying to negotiate the contract. We were called the G-40, because there were 40 of us. Together we represented a good chunk of Tony Stone’s income, like 30-40% of all the money they made. That is a lot of negotiating power I thought.†

BH: One would think.
PG: †Well, one day, Jonathan Klein called one of the photographers and said, you really don’t have enough clout. If you had 50% maybe we’d deal with you. But you don’t have enough.†

BH: So, how many of that 40 signed?
PG: 39. Everybody signed it but me. The others were granted a few concessions, but nothing significant. I kept thinking, maybe I can sign if Getty would just make a few more changes for me. But they refused. For instance, I thought if I just could give them pictures for the catalog—only for their catalog—I’d sign. But they wouldn’t agree to something as simple as that. They had put our pictures on the web because we said we wouldn’t negotiate with them unless they honored the terms of our existing contracts, which included the “best efforts” clause. They had to use their best effort to sell the pictures and that meant putting them on the web. But six months later, they took my pictures off the web, and never told me why.

BH: What year did they take your work off the web?
PG: Around April, 1999.

BH: And how long did your existing contract run?
PG: Until September, 2001.

BH: So in effect, they kept your work out of the market for...
PG: Two and a half years, yes.

BH: Because you wouldn’t sign a bad contract?
PG: Yes.

BH: How much latitude did you have to sell those pictures yourself?
PG: I could only sell them myself for editorial uses. They had all other rights to those pictures tied up exclusively, until September, 2001.

BH: In effect, they were embargoing your work to force you to sign a contract you didn’t want to sign.
PG: Yes, and they were withholding my licensing fees, too. I had an overdue balance of more than a hundred thousand dollars.

BH: So what did you do?
PG: Well, I was looking at my records very closely. Getty sent me my sales and payments digitally. So I matched up the cancellations with the original license, to see what was going on. That took a lot of time. I wanted to see if there was a reason for all these cancellations. I knew that clients had paid Getty for these licenses because I saw my work in print. So I wanted Getty to pay me.†

BH: Can you give us an example?
PG: Well, one example was a $16,000 license fee for a photo that Origins Cosmetics used for point-of-purchase posters. They had used it for months, but I still hadn’t been paid for it. And I know from my own experience clients pay, especially when it’s already out there in use. So I called Getty, I talked to my lawyer about it, I did an analysis of the cancellations and all the other problems. My lawyer wrote a letter to Getty, addressing all the issues: My sales going down, the cancellations, not being on the web, not being paid.†

BH: And?
PG: They didn’t reply. After a month we wrote another letter—this was in the summer of 1999—and they finally replied. But they told my lawyer that they didn’t want to deal with him. They said he should recuse himself because years before he had done a little work for them. So instead of simply working out the problems, they put up a roadblock. We decided to get an audit. We scheduled it for November 1999. My accountant thought that because I knew the records so well, I should go to Chicago (where the office is). I made extensive lists of the problem licenses and narrowed them down to about 500 specific licenses and cancellations. That was less than 10% of my total licenses with them. We went to Chicago for a two-day audit and they stonewalled us again. They said they didn’t have to show us any records because the records were proprietary. You can’t know these details, they said. And so the fun began. My lawyer called their lawyer and they were on the phone for two days. I had probably five or six conversations with my lawyers during those two days. Getty was willing to show us only what they wanted to show us. But it was enough to see that they didn’t have substantiation for the cancellations.

BH: †Of the five hundred specific, how many did you actually see?
PG: About 10%. Some from the U.S., some from London.

BH: But no proof the licenses had been canceled?
PG: According to the license terms, they had to have it in writing—that is, the client had to write a letter saying we need to cancel this and why, and stipulate that they hadn’t used it. But we didn’t see hardly any of that. Then I was allowed 20 minutes to look at my pictures. But when I did a keyword search for “close-up babies,” I saw pictures that looked like mine but weren’t mine. In fact, they came up first. Mine came up towards the middle or the end. This was weird because I was a top-selling photographer, not that mine would have to come up first, but why were they in the back like that? So then I looked for growing baby pictures and up came the work of three London-based photographers which looked shockingly like mine. I couldn’t believe it. †These things took me a year to do and here was Getty, making pictures so much like mine in London.

BH: Was this the first you knew about it?
PG: Yes.

BH: How many London photographers were doing this?
PG: Six. The person in the Chicago office volunteered that information. She said, see the prefix BB? That’s the London office. I wanted to see the keywords that Getty had for my growing baby pictures, and they were minimal to none. One had five keywords. The second had three. And the third one only had two keywords. But when I got back to New York, I looked up the pictures of these London photographers on the web and saw that they had 40 or 50 key words for each of their pictures. Then I looked to see what other work these photographers did and none were baby photographs. They were lifestyle or still life photographers. They did different work completely. I concluded that Getty art directed these copies because if you can get an overseas photographer to do it, Getty can make a much bigger percentage—70%—in the lucrative U.S. market, which accounts for roughly 50% of Getty’s worldwide sales.†

BH: So, when you discovered this, did you confront Getty?†
PG: Well, the audit was so antagonistic that when I got back from Chicago I met with my lawyer. Then I talked to ASMP, and called Patsy Felch. We felt we had no choice but to file a lawsuit.

BH: What was Getty’s response?
PG: Not much. After we filed the lawsuit, they offered us an audit—under their complete control—but only if I would drop all my claims, which had to do with copyright infringement, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract.

BH: And what happened?
PG: Absolutely nothing for an entire year. †Thirteen months later Getty had not produced one single document. They told the judge “we offered her an audit.” But of course it was an audit with their people, on their terms—and I would have had to drop my case and accept whatever results Getty’s auditors came up with. But the judge said, this case has been going on for thirteen months—this is a lawsuit, not an audit. So Getty finally had to produce the documents. I don’t know where Getty’s lawyers learned how to do discovery—but ultimately it was about 70,000 papers.

BH: Of course they dumped all that stuff on you to swamp you and bog you down.
PG: Yes. And duplicates upon duplicates, all out of order. It was a mess.††

BH: It’s an old legal tactic.
PG: Well, I worked day and night reviewing everything and making lists, making lists of the cancellations, looking for reasons, not finding them, weeding out which cancellations were the bad ones, which ones weren’t so bad. Finding unreported licenses. I found unlicensed uses of my pictures—things I’d seen on book covers and in magazines. They were even selling pictures that they had rejected.†

BH: What do you mean?
PG: Pictures they had sent back, not chosen, or not in use. Like in 1998, they sent back a lot of pictures with a little note saying, “culled; replaced by newer images.” I thought it was part of the psychological war—a kind of cutting us down to size. It was like our checks getting smaller, trying to make us see how dependent we were on Getty so we’d sign their lousy new contract.†

BH: So what kind of evidence did you extract from this mountain of documents?
PG: Oh, it cost me hundreds, ultimately thousands, of hours, but I made extensive lists. So after a couple of months, I wanted to have a conference with them to discuss a settlement. But that was just another circus. Getty’s main lawyer left after just a couple of hours. It was like they just wanted to come and see what we had on them. For their own discovery. After that, they stepped up what they were doing.†

BH: How?
PG: Someone else came on board and wrote letter after letter, refusing to do this and that, making roadblocks. Oh, another thing, before all this—12 months into the lawsuit I got so frustrated I called London photographers. I wanted to see what I could do on my own.

BH: Did you contact all six?
PG: Five. I couldn’t get the sixth one. But it was just as I suspected. Getty had asked them to do these pictures. They didn’t say Getty put my pictures in front of their nose, but Getty gave them the specific characteristics of my pictures. Getty art-directed them and for some of the pictures—like the growing baby pictures, Getty actually had their own art department create the photocompositions, making them similar to mine.

BH: So they essentially used the work of these London photographers as raw material for their own derivative work.
PG: Yeah exactly. And that is when we started thinking—we had not thought of these as copyright infringements yet. That is when we started thinking, maybe these are copyright infringements.

BH: So, is this when you added the copyright infringement to the lawsuit?
PG: Well, actually, we had copyright infringement in the complaint for the other things, like the unreported licenses, unlicensed uses, and the cancellations. ††The copycat photos were in the complaint as breaches of fiduciary duty. †During discovery, we were realizing that the copycat photos could be †copyright infringements too. We were leaning towards amending our complaint, but we didn’t. Getty took the issue of these developing copyright claims and made the ugliest sort of mess they could. As they say in sports, the best defense is an offense. They apparently wanted to make it look as if I thought I was the only one in the world allowed to photograph babies.†

BH: And that’s what the judge said in his decision.
PG: You know, after I had those conversations with the British photographers, I thought, wow, now Getty will settle. My lawyer told the Getty lawyers we’ve got this evidence—we’ve got this information from the London photographers that’s going to shock you. But that’s all she said. Then, right away, Getty called these photographers themselves and later got depositions from them.

BH: Did you have to go to London?
PG: Yes. I never imagined going to London because, God, it’s so expensive. Why would I need to do that. But they made us go to London. A week’s worth of depositions.† And during my wedding anniversary, so personally, it was a drag.

BH: Were you able to depose the same photographers yourself?
PG: Well, they were Getty’s witnesses. Getty deposed them! All we could do was cross-examine them. But we did really well. We left London thinking, wow, now we have this proof of what Getty did.

BH: So, the photographers confirmed what they had told you?
PG: Pretty much. I mean they weren’t as frank. They were polite and politically correct. They were Getty photographers, Getty witnesses. But they said virtually everything they said to me on the phone, and we were thrilled. We thought, wow, we have them confirming that they were art directed to do this, that they had seen my work, that Getty took their pictures and made photocompositions with them.

BH: That looked like yours...†
PG: Yeah, and that is when we felt, yeah, copyright infringements. So we showed them to an expert and, without saying anything—just by showing him the pictures—he made his own opinion. He said he thought that there were substantial similarities between my photographs and theirs.†

BH: Who was the expert?
PG: Rod Slemmons.

BH: What’s his background?
PG: He was a professor in Seattle at the time, and used to be the curator of photography at the Seattle museum. Now he’s in Chicago, a curator at a museum.†

BH: So he was deposed?
PG: Yes, Getty deposed him, in Chicago.

BH: Okay, so Getty deposed him and even then he said that there were significant similarities?
PG: Yes.†

BH: So what came out of all of that? Was Getty able to dig up anybody else who said there were no significant similarities?
PG: No. They hit us with a motion to bar our other expert witness, Jim Pickerell, who was our expert damages witness. Then they filed a summary judgment motion.

BH: Explain summary judgment.
PG: That’s where the judge can dismiss a case without going to trial on the grounds that it’s not based in the law, or that it has no questions of fact.

BH: This was in 2002, right?
PG: Yeah. But, before that, Getty filed the motion to bar Pickerell as our damages witness. They asked to file an oversize brief. But the extra pages, as it turned out, were used as a sort of personal slam against me.†

BH: †Slamming you how?
PG: †Personal insults, befuddlement, obscuring the issues. Getty really intensified their mudslinging with that motion to bar our witness—and even more so in the next motion, the summary judgment motion. That one was pretty big, too. 80 pages. It was mostly about the copycat issues. They really distorted our claims.

BH: The claims that the British photographers were imitating your work?

PG: Yes. They slammed me right and left. They got all our claims wrong, distorted, mottled, twisted. For example, they had a list of 35 pictures they claimed that I claimed were copied, but we really only had 15.

BH: Do you think the point was just to portray you as an irrational sorehead?
PG: Exactly, that was their defense all the way through—to make me look hysterical, crazy and unrealistic. Out of my mind.

BH: So, by having discovery that you were being cloned by these people, Getty used that to portray you as just another artist who thinks they’ve been copied, like every artist thinks they’ve been ripped off. Therefore, you’re just a nut with a hysterical lawsuit.†
PG: Right.

BH: In effect, a misdirection of attention away from the basics of the case?
PG: Exactly.†

BH: And the judge bought it. Because from the language in the ruling, Getty could have written it for him.†
PG: Yes, it did seem that way. The language was devastating. Full of personal insults. I didn’t think our justice system could be like that. I’d spent months documenting all these unreported licenses. There were 133 of them and 40 unlicensed uses of various other types. It was so damning. Yet, I never got to show any of this to a jury. And the cancellations, and the withholding of payments, and everything else. I never got to prove Getty’s breach of fiduciary duty.

BH: You mean nobody ever even saw it?
PG: Well, the judge supposedly did, but I don’t think he looked at anything. In the ruling he just laid into me with all these insults, saying, hogs get slaughtered, etc. That was really shocking. We filed a motion for reconsideration, but the judge merely dismissed it at the motion hearing.

BH: In his ruling the judge stressed Getty’s prerogative as an agency. Yet, what Getty was doing was using your agency contract to keep your work off the market to force you to sign a new contract that absolved them of any obligation to act in your best interest. That should have made it clear Getty wasn’t acting as an agency.
PG: Exactly. They have your pictures under their control, they have your assets and they’re using it all against you, when as an agent, they must act in your best interests, and any prerogative they had to set license terms was balanced by the best efforts clause to maximize your earnings.

BH: I saw the statement that the CEO of Getty gave Photo District News. He warned photographers they were keeping their work off the web until they signed the new contract. And when they signed the new contract, they’d be paid for all sales within 120 days. His own words. That statement alone should have made it clear they weren’t honoring your existing contract. Because that contract said they had to make their best efforts to sell your work, right?
PG: Yeah. I thought this lawsuit would open that up, that whole issue about the ††contract because I thought that was just so clearly against the law. They †withheld tens of thousands of dollars from me, with the implication that they wouldn’t pay until I signed the contract. Because I didn’t sign it, it took a †lawsuit and several years to shake loose that money.

BH: And if they are getting others to duplicate your work under terms more favorable to them, that meant Getty had become your competitor. It’s astonishing that the judge couldn’t see the obvious.
PG: Yeah, we spent over three years bringing this case to the court, doing all this work and collecting all this evidence, with my lawyers working so hard writing stacks of briefs and answering all their extraneous tons of stuff. Then, after all this, the court misconstrues it and says, “hogs get slaughtered.”

Penny Gentieu is a highly acclaimed photographer specializing in babies.

She has been creating her signature style baby photos since 1985.† Her images have appeared on over 200 magazine covers including four covers of Time.† She is the author of nine books of babies. Wow! Babies! received Parents Magazine "Best Book of 1997" and she was awarded "Best Photography Website" by Photo District News in 1998.† She has had numerous articles written about her, including a five-page feature in Photo Insider Magazine in 1999.

You can also read: "Gentieu Litigation Shows Brute Force of the Courts" by attorney Stephen Filler, Esq. †The article, written for the IPA, discusses the inexplicable behavior of the court in denying Gentieu a jury trial for her serious allegations of contract violation and copyright infringement:

Gentieu Litigation Shows Brute Force of the Courts

See her photos on her website,http://www.babystock.com