REPORT: Radio host Dennis Prager and his business partner Allen Estrin had a big problem on their hands.
It was October, 2013. Several years earlier, the duo—friends for decades—co-founded PragerU, a small digital university for conservatives with a modest audience. Now, a stranger was suing them.
The man, a photographer in Ireland, alleged through a Houston lawyer that PragerU had used one of his photographs in an online educational video without his consent.
Estrin, a former Hollywood screenwriter with little experience navigating the intricacies of digital copyright issues, calls the episode “traumatic.”
“We had a visual style that used photographs, and someone really almost out of nowhere sued us for the use of a photo,” Estrin recalls in an interview with The Daily Signal. “As a result of being sued, we did a lot of investigation into [how you can] use photos on the Internet, and the copyright ramifications of photos, and what to do going forward.”
What Estrin and Prager did was overhaul their entire visual video aesthetic to a streamlined, animation-based model, abandoning four years of work and 80 educational videos.
“And in one of those things that doesn’t happen very much in life but I’m happy to say I’ve experienced, this very traumatic experience was the best thing that could have possibly happened to us,” Estrin says.
“This year we will have more than 50 million views as confirmed by YouTube and Facebook,” Prager says in an email to The Daily Signal, adding that “the largest single demographic of our videos are people under 35 years of age.”
