Getty Images is sued for $1 billion

An accomplished photographer who lets the public use thousands of her images of America for free has sued the Getty Images photo agency for more than $1 billion, saying it is improperly selling her work to customers and threatening those who don’t pay.

The photographer, Carol Highsmith, whose work has been featured in books, newspapers and magazines and on two postage stamps, said she became aware that Getty was selling her work in December, when she received a letter from an affiliated company accusing her of copyright infringement for using one of her own photographs on the website of her nonprofit group, the This is America Foundation. The letter demanded a settlement payment of $120.

“While we appreciate the effort of removing the material in question from your site, we still need compensation,” the letter said. “Your company has benefited by using our imagery without our permission.”

The photo, of a striking sculpture of a badminton shuttlecock outside the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., was one of thousands Highsmith has made available to the public through the U.S. Library of Congress for a quarter of a century.

Highsmith’s lawsuit, which was before a federal judge in New York for an initial conference Wednesday, said about 18,000 of the photographs in that collection were being offered for sale by Getty, at prices of $175 to $575.

Based on those numbers, her lawyers are asking for $468 million in damages tripled because Getty had a judgment entered against it in another copyright case within the last three years.

Highsmith did not attend Wednesday’s court session and declined to be interviewed.

A lawyer for Getty Images, Kenneth Doroshow, told the judge he plans to ask for the lawsuit to be dismissed.

The Seattle company said last month that the lawsuit is based on “misconceptions.” It said it’s standard practice for image libraries to distribute content that’s in the public domain. And it said it’s legal to charge fees to cover costs including indexing and digitizing content.