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A FEDERAL COURT IN NEW YORK HAS HIT STOCK photo agency Corbis with orders to pay two photographers a total of $824,806 for lost images. Photographer Arthur Grace won a $667,685 judgment on January 30 for the loss of 45,000 images, while photographer Chris Usher was awarded $157,121 February 29 for the loss of 12,640 of his images.
The awards, handed down in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, amounted to estimates of the income the images would have generated had they not been lost. That method of valuation differs from many other lost slide cases, which have based damage awards on estimates of the dollar value of the lost images.
In the Arthur Grace case, the court revised a 2005 ruling in which it had set damages at $472,000.
Grace covered major news events, politics, sports and celebrities during the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. He submitted the images for worldwide distribution through Sygma, the French news photo agency acquired by Corbis in 1999.
In 2001, Grace quit the agency and asked for the return of his images. Although Corbis returned many images, it was unable to account for thousands more, so Grace sued for damages in...