Adorable child in NGO fund-raising photo sues for royalties

The law firm Klayme, Chaise, & Steele LLC announced today that one of their clients was suing the prominent non-governmental organization (NGO) Care for the Children (CFTC) for unauthorized use of the client’s photo as a child.. The lawyers revealed their client is now a sophomore at a university, but refuses to give his name or home country to protect what is left of his privacy. The client remembers vividly the day he came across the cover of the CFTC brochure “Give for the Sake of the Children”, which featured a picture of himself as a child. The lawyers said, “At no time was permission given to CFTC by the child, his parents, or legal guardians to take such a photo, much less to broadcast innumerable copies of it around the Western world to gather funding for this organization.”

Moreover, the lawyers said, “at no time was our client compensated by Care for the Children, a beneficiary of such organization, or even aware of the existence of this organization.” Klayme, Chaise, and Steele LLC have filed a court petition to have Care for the Children turn over its photographic records to bolster their claim.

Lord Mall Blacke, a spokesman for Care for the Children, said they doubted the lawyers could prove their client was the same as the one in the photograph. “We don’t keep records of individuals in our photographs. We don’t know when this photograph was taken, or where. We can only guess it was somewhere in Africa. Or maybe Haiti.”

Other NGOs with similar photo and fund-raising practices are watching the case nervously.

DISCLAIMER: Klayme, Chaise, and Steele LLC is a fictional limited-liability corporation under New York State law, and hereby reserves the right to make fictional statements about non-true occurrences and related non-existent organizations and individuals to score heavy-handed satirical points for serious purposes.