Battle Of The Billionaires: Gates' Corbis Sues Bezos' Amazon.com

from the copyright-this dept

Corbis, the photo archiving company owned by Bill Gates, surprised Amazon.com by suing the e-commerce site for copyright infringement. The issue appears to be that 3rd party sellers in Amazon's "marketplace" are selling images from Corbis' database. Of course, in this case, Amazon is just acting as the middleman. They're like eBay. As a service provider, they have no responsibility for the content that's being sold on their site via third party sellers - unless alerted to it. That's the part that seems confusing to Amazon. They say Corbis never bothered to contact them directly and point out the infringing material - most of which they're now taking down. It's unclear how Amazon could be found at fault here.

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