The media asks the Supreme Court to protect them from "photo terror."

      The media industry is facing a systemic problem: lawsuits for the protection of rights to digital images have increased eight thousand times over the past ten years, and plaintiffs have collectively earned about 1.5 billion rubles from such cases. This data was provided by the president of the Association of Media Executives, Nadezhda Plotnikova, whose words were cited by the portal "RT."

      The reason for the appeal to the Supreme Court was the persistent legal practice in which the cost of stock photos during court proceedings increases exponentially—by hundreds of times—compared to their actual price. At the same time, editorial offices find themselves under threat even in cases where they have cooperated in good faith with external contractors to acquire visual content.

      In the media community, what is happening is characterized not as the protection of intellectual rights, but as serial litigation. That is why the ARM is asking the highest judicial authority to draw the attention of lower courts to the need to more actively apply the norm against the abuse of rights when considering such disputes. There are currently no clear guidelines for judges, which leads to discrepancies in decisions and creates fertile ground for mass lawsuits.

      The lack of unified rules particularly impacts small editorial offices. Fearing risks that are disproportionate to the actual scale of the violation, many of them prefer to forgo legal visual content. The paradox of the situation is that the attempt to operate civilly and purchase photographs through official channels today turns into a financial trap for such media outlets, and the judicial process itself transforms from a mechanism for protecting authorship into a tool for systematically collecting money from the press.