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Miranda Heise and her mother, Debra Heise, stand in front of the cabin where Debra spent her summers in Crystal, Colorado
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The Heise family owns the town and Crystal Mill. Crystal is a virtual ghost town in a valley on the upper Crystal River in Gunnison County, on a precipitous, a four-wheel-drive-only road between Marble and Crested Butte. Many buildings still stand in Crystal, but its handful of residents live there only in the summer. Crystal was incorporated in 1881 but mined as early as the 1860s. At its peak, Crystal had more than 400 residents in town and the surrounding mining claims, two newspapers, a pool hall, a men's club, a barber shop and two hotels. By 1915, only eight people lived there after the silver, lead, copper, iron, and zinc mines played out. Tourists and photographers often take Jeep tours up to Crystal from Marble, just to see the quaint Crystal Mill, which is actually an early, crude compressor site that used the rushing Crystal River to power various mining machinery in the high valley.
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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