Business News Roundup, Aug. 25

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’s improperly selling her work to customers and threatening those who don’t pay.

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 This Is America Foundation.

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-century.

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.

[...] it said it’s legal to charge fees to cover costs including indexing, archiving, digitizing and making content easily searchable.

Highsmith, in her lawsuit, said that in sharing the photographs through the Library of Congress she never intended to abandon the copyright to those images or to enable third parties to sell them for profit “or send threatening letters to people who used her photos.”

Highsmith’s photos are among 15 million images in the library’s Prints & Photographs archive, which also includes the work of Civil War master photographer Mathew Brady and Depression and Dust Bowl photojournalist Dorothea Lange.

Pfizer Inc. is continuing its shopping spree with its fourth acquisition since the April collapse of its planned $160 billion megadeal to buy rival Allergan PLC and move its headquarters, on paper, to Allergan’s base in lower-tax Ireland.

In its second deal this week, Pfizer said it’s buying rights to AstraZeneca PLC’s portfolio of approved and experimental antibiotic and antifungal pills, a move to boost Pfizer’s business in one of its priority areas.

Pfizer will get rights to some medicines in development and approved ones including Merrem, for treating bacterial meningitis and serious infections of the skin and stomach; Zinforo, for pneumonia and complex skin and soft tissue infections; and Zavicefta, a combination antibiotic the European Union just approved for treating serious bacterial infections.

Uber has teamed up with an automated investor service to offer drivers a way to set up retirement accounts through the ride-hailing app.

Sales of existing homes fell 3.2 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.39 million, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.

Fewer homes are coming onto the market, capping the sales growth that came in part from low mortgage rates and a brightening job market.

The dwindling supply has pushed up prices, which suggests a market not yet at full health.