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First Circuit Hears Arguments in Suit over A&E Photo Use

By Sheri Qualters
May 31, 2012

In May 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit considered a photographer's case against television companies over alleged infringement of his image of a notorious imposter who called himself Clark Rockefeller. Donald Harney filed his lawsuit, Harney v. Sony Pictures Television Inc., 11-1760, in July 2010, alleging that Sony Pictures Television and A&E Television Networks infringed on his photo of Rockefeller and his daughter in the made-for-television movie Who Is Clark Rockefeller? Harney's photo depicted the father and daughter leaving a church in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood on Palm Sunday, March 31, 2007. The Beacon Hill Times published the photo in April 2007.

Rockefeller, a German man whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, was convicted in June 2009 in Massachusetts Superior Court of parental kidnapping of his daughter, Reigh, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to a maximum of five years in state prison for both charges. In January 2012, a judge in Alhambra Superior Court in California ruled that Gerhartsreiter must stand trial for the murder of Jonathan Sohus. Sohus disappeared in 1985, at a time when Gerhartsreiter was renting a guesthouse at Sohus' mother's San Marino, CA, home under the name Christopher Chichester.

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