Mr. Hilton (Getty)
Photographer Robert Caplin suing Perez Hilton for copyright infringement after the gossip blogger used photos of Glee actor Darren Criss on his site without permission, according to a complaint filed in Los Angeles Federal Court.
According to the complaint, Mr. Hilton published 14 copyrighted images on PerezHilton.com and added his own watermark over the photographer's. Mr. Caplin is asking for damages of $2,100,000 ($150,000 per photograph).
Mr. Caplin shot pictures of Mr. Criss for a Times story about the Glee actor's Broadway debut that ran in the paper in January 2012 and published 32 photos on his website.
"Last week I got a call from the New York Times asking me to photograph Darren Criss, the breakout star of the Fox high school musical series Glee, to accompany a story about his upcoming Broadway debut in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," Mr. Caplin wrote at the time on a blog post where he included the images.
When Mr. Caplin saw that Mr. Hilton had grabbed the images and applied his own watermark, he asked the gossip blogger to remove them. But Mr. Hilton did not take the images off his site, according to Mr. Caplin. That's when he decided to sue. The photos then disappeared, but the lawsuit has not.