A difference of three days was crucial to determining whether a financial planning office violated federal copyright law when it used a photograph from an Australian commercial photographer’s Flickr website in a blog post.

The plaintiff, Alex Proimos, sued Marotta Wealth Management in May 2022 over an image of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia posted on Flickr.com between 2011 and 2013. Marotta used the photo in a blog post on Dec. 17, 2019, just prior to Proimos registering the photo with the U.S. Copyright Office Dec. 20, 2019, according to an order filed last month by U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon of the Western District of Virginia.