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A block of Main Street that includes the 1886 Beaumont Hotel in Ouray, Colorado, an old mining community high in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado
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In its day, the Beaumont was one of the grandest hotels in western Colorado. It was one of the first hotels in America to be wired for alternating-current electricity. It hosted guests such as presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. The hotel closed in 1964 due to declining tourism in the area. For more than 30 years the hotel sat empty, boarded up and in disrepair. At one point part of the roof collapsed, and more than once the building was considered for condemnation. The hotel was sold in 1998 and was meticulously restored, its multiple rooms combined into a more spacious arrangement. The large hotel building now (in 2015) has just 12 guest rooms.
Credit line: Gates Frontiers Fund Colorado Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Gift; Gates Frontiers Fund; 2015; (DLC/PP-2015:068).
Forms part of: Gates Frontiers Fund Colorado Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive.
In 2015, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge. In 2016, Highsmith has filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against both Alamy and Getty stating “gross misuse” of 18,755 of her photographs. “The defendants [Getty Images] have apparently misappropriated Ms. Highsmith’s generous gift to the American people,” the complaint reads. “[They] are not only unlawfully charging licensing fees … but are falsely and fraudulently holding themselves out as the exclusive copyright owner.” According to the lawsuit, Getty and Alamy, on their websites, have been selling licenses for thousands of Highsmith’s photographs, many without her name attached to them and stamped with “false watermarks.” (more: http://hyperallergic.com/314079/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/)
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