As a media entrepreneur along with being a lifelong reporter, I understand the frustration when someone rips off your work. When I was a cub reporter I used to hate it. And as a publisher of premium photography, it is always frustrating to see your carefully-created work reposted with no credit or compensation. Copyright is central to our future as we grapple with AI LLMS that scrape our content and give us nothing in return.
But I also know when I’m being scammed.
For the second time, TheWrap has been sued over a 32-year-old Fox publicity photo by Michael Grecco, a photographer who makes a living by suing people, including lots of legitimate news organizations, for copyright violation.
A publicity photo, you’re thinking? Aren’t those licensed for use by the news media all the time, as a matter of course?
Why yes, yes they are.
But try convincing Michael Grecco, professional troll, who has sued well over 100 times in the past decade, demanding and getting what I conservatively estimate to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements for photos that he claims violate his copyright. He can do this because since about 2015, the internet has created a tool for him to scrape every website for something that resembles an image he shot back in the 1990s.
Consider this: Between 2002 and 2025 Grecco has sued 220 times, according to a Lexus-Nexus search. Between 2016 and this year he has filed 85 actions in California, and 33 more in New York, all copyright cases, according to the Pacer database.
He has sued everyone from tiny blogs like AwardsDaily to media giants like Meta, Verizon, TikTok, Twitter, Paramount and Warner Bros.
He’s sued Bloomberg. He’s sued the New York Performing Arts Academy.
He has sued media companies across the spectrum: IMDb, Time Inc., PopMatters, Penske Media, Shutterstock, Valnet, Ain’t It Cool News, Fandom, Hearst, Uproxx, Guardian News, Buzzfeed and Tribune.
And TheWrap. Twice.
These cases all settled. This tally does not include demand letters that usually also settle, my guess is in the range of $10,000 a pop. Some might call it a very savvy moneymaking scheme from a past career shooting photos in Hollywood.
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In 1993, Grecco was hired by Fox to shoot promotional photos of Mulder and Scully – David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson – in character on the set of “The X-Files.”
Amazingly, Fox does not own all those photos. (I know – crazy.)
Their status isn’t exactly clear, as I found out when I tried to figure out why we kept making the same error of using a non-licensed image, which is a cardinal sin in our newsroom. Grecco says that he owns the copyright to these photos. But at one point, Fox claimed that it owned the copyright in these photos.
Here’s the photo, viewable in the lawsuit that we settled.
Looks like a publicity photo. In fact, it is a publicity photo — it was included in a press kit that we found and secured from a memorabilia collector. (See image below.) And it’s a frame or two away from the photo displayed with this article, part of the same shoot, with the photo we’ve published, that one owned by Fox.
But unless I go to trial, I can’t prove it.
Here’s the thing, though. In 2019, Fox learned that Grecco was suing people left and right and sent him a notice to cease and desist. But it turned out that Fox had not done what it needed to do legally to maintain copyright over the publicity photos. In the end, the parties settled, with Grecco releasing Fox from any liability, and agreeing that Fox had the right to use the photos for publicity.
The settlement reads: “[Fox] agrees and acknowledges that the scope of Grecco’s license to Fox in the remaining Gallery photographs is limited to the Permitted non-exclusive uses, which, for the avoidance of all doubt, permits all advertising and publicity uses, including but not limited to retrospective advertising and publicity uses and archival advertising and publicity uses.”
The settlement was meant to be kept secret, which was helpful to Grecco’s living as a copyright troll.
But attorney Joshua Koltun learned about the settlement in a lawsuit that Grecco had brought against Koltun’s client Livingly Media. And it became public after Grecco’s attorneys chose not to defend the documents’ secrecy, which they initially claimed were “trade secrets.”
Court documents from that case show that Grecco never made any money by licensing this photograph prospectively. His licensing income from this photograph has come from suing people for copyright infringement and settling for a fee for a retrospective “license” for the past use.
Asked about the secrecy, a lawyer for Grecco wrote to TheWrap: “To claim that Grecco is trying to keep a Fox agreement ‘secret’ is absurd as the agreement is confidential and has disclosure provisions that need to be followed.” Regardless of who is correct, the settlement is now visible to the public.
Koltun represented a defendant who, like TheWrap, was sued over Grecco’s publicity photos for exorbitant sums. Livingly decided to fight the case. (Almost no one ever does so, because the cost of litigating is enormous. One Grecco lawsuit I found in the docket was against Fandom, which in a rare instance Fandom won by proving they had never received Grecco’s demand letter. But Fandom’s request for $600,000 in attorney’s fees – what the company paid to prove it was right – was denied. You see the problem.)
Not only did he discover the Fox settlement, Koltun won numerous arguments in a summary judgement motion over whether media companies had a right to use the photos, and rejecting a number of arguments Grecco made.
In a court order, the judge wrote:
“The Fox Settlement Agreement states that Fox has a ‘worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid, perpetual, advertising and publicity use of the Gallery Photographs, including the right to sublicense the Gallery Photographs for advertising and publicity purposes‘ (emphasis mine) and defines the Gallery Photographs as The X-Files photographs Fox engaged Grecco to take around August 1993. Fox Settlement Agreement at 15.”
“The Gallery” photographs are “the photographs Fox engaged Grecco to take of The X-Files in August 1993,” the order said. The Court’s full decision is here. A useful summary of the facts is in Koltun’s summary judgement motion.
From Grecco’s standpoint, he believes that he is entitled to sue media companies that used these publicity photos in articles about “The X-files,” despite the 2019 settlement. But who can say?
You’d think that would be that, but my lawsuit just ended in a second, expensive settlement. Which it shouldn’t have.
For comparison’s sake, a photo license for online use averages $300-$500 per use, depending on the subject and the photographer.
According to Koltun, “Anyone receiving a legal complaint from Michael Grecco would be well advised to review the public record in the Livingly case, which discloses a lot of information Grecco’s attorneys had claimed was a ‘trade secret.’”
I’ve reached out to Disney, who now owns Fox, to try to get some clarity on this. I find it hard to believe the studio is pleased that legitimate news organizations are paying out extortionist sums over photos that were taken on their behalf. I haven’t heard back thus far.
Bottom line: Most media companies are under the gun right now, figuring out a future that is likely to exclude Google search, which drives revenue for many of us. A troll like Grecco is more than a nuisance, it’s a loaded gun aimed at the already pock-marked revenue model for news. Most especially entertainment news, where he used to work.
So for any other news org that finds itself in a fight with Grecco, know that there are two judgements in your column worth taking all the way to a jury, even if I could not get there.
I reached out to Grecco for comment. His lawyer replied: “The business of our client in this case … is photography. Photography is protected by copyright, just like journalism. The internet has decimated the businesses of our clients who make their living from their creativity. Their copyrights protect their productive output, as do yours.”
