I recently read an article about Phillip DiCorcia being sued by one of the poepl he had photographed in his series of pictures based in Times Square NY.
(See *1 for background info on this case)

I made a big fuss about how one could justify $500,000 worth of compensation for a single image and that it seemed completely unjust and blown out of the water just so this one bloke could make money from DiCorcia’s fame.

Here is a similar scenario, but the Photographer Richard Rinsdorf is suing the shoe company Sketchers for violating the license agreement for a number of images he produced between 2006-2009. Part of the license agreement stated that Sketchers could use this image for up to six months, but the images must cease being used there after.
It turns out Sketchers have carried on using his images for years after the six month period ran out, but in different countries to try and avoid him finding out.
Rinsdorf has demanded a staggering $250,000,000 in compensation for this violation of the contract…

At first I was staggered and once more ashamed that people have the audacity to demand such an extraordinary amount of money for something like this. But once you read more into it, you can understand that one single violation of an image, copyright and contract could justify a sum of $150,000 in compensation, so if you take into consideration that his pictures have been violated many times all over the world, you can start to comprehend the staggering sum of $250,000,000.

As the case pans out I’ll be interested to see how much money he actually makes out of this, I’ll post about it again when I have more information. 

*1 

Between 1999-2001 Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed pedestrians in Times Square, NYC.
The resulting works were shown at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. When Erno
Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City,
N.J., saw his picture in the exhibition catalogue, he sued diCorcia and Pace
for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting
from it financially. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and
publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and
$1.5 million in punitive damages.The suit was eventually dismissed by a New
York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer's right to
artistic expression trumped the subject's privacy rights.

Mr. Nussenzweig's lawyer, Jay Goldberg, told The New York Law Journal that his
client "has lost control over his own image" he went on to say
"It's a terrible invasion to me," Mr. Goldberg said. "The last
thing a person has is his own dignity."