HollywoodChicago.com Seeks Legal Guidance on Flood of Leaked Images From ‘The Dark Knight’

At 8:13 p.m. on Thursday, I received an e-mail with a link to a Web site with a flood of highly spoiling images from “The Dark Knight”. I proceeded to seek legal guidance.

In a conversation with my lawyer, these images are clearly copyrighted material of Warner Bros. Beyond requesting a cease-and-desist order, he says the studio could file for statutory damages on the order of $100,000 per incident.

As 19 photos were leaked, that would be $1.9 million.

Various mainstream film sites are publishing the photos from the initial site. I will not be publishing the photos or the link to the initial site. Others who have are knowingly in receipt of stolen property and putting it online is a crime.

11:46 p.m. update: As expected, cease-and-desist orders have been issued ato various sites posting the images. I requested an account of how this happened from my initial source:

These were to be used on some of the upcoming viral marketing sites. Instead, they leaked.

Someone at Warner Bros. had them on their computer, copies were made, they were originally posted on someone’s MySpace page, the Brazillian site got them and then fan sites started posting copies.

Warner Bros. went [nuts] and started sending cease and desists to the fan sites all within the course of about four hours. It is amazing how quickly in an evening their legal team jumped into action to suppress the leak.