A man found his photo on a Nescafe coffee can (4 photos)

He sued and won, but the case took an unexpected turn.





Imagine walking through a store, picking up a can of coffee from the shelf, and suddenly noticing on the packaging... your own photo. For one man, it wasn't just a prank or a joke, but a real event.

In 2005, a school teacher named Russell Christoff accidentally discovered that his photo was being used on a can of Nescafé Taster's Choice instant coffee. This discovery led to a lawsuit with Nestlé USA, which initially resulted in Kristoff being awarded a substantial amount of damages.

Although he won the case, what happened next unfolded in a way no one could have predicted.

Background



In the 1980s, Russell Kristoff worked as a model and participated in a photo shoot for Nestlé Canada.

The terms of the contract called for Russell to receive a $2,000 fee and a percentage of the first sales if his photo was used on any Nestlé product.

For the photo shoot itself, which took two hours, Kristoff received only $250.

As Kristoff later claimed, months and then years passed, the company never notified him about the use of the photos or paid him the promised $2,000, which is why he believed that his photos remained unclaimed.

However, in 1997, Nestlé USA decided to redesign the label for their Taster's Choice coffee and chose a photo of Kristoff from their old photo shoot, believing that they already had the rights to use the photos.

Since 1998, Kristoff's image has appeared on updated labels of coffee cans sold in the United States and other countries. Kristoff himself was not notified that his photo was being used and did not receive any corresponding payments.

Lawsuit





It wasn't until 2005 that Kristoff (who had long since retired from modeling and become a simple school teacher) discovered his face on a coffee can in a store, according to his students, and filed a lawsuit against Nestlé USA for unauthorized use of his photo.

Nestle offered to settle the dispute immediately by paying Russell Kristoff $100,000 in compensation plus a percentage of sales for the period from 1998 to 2000, but he refused, demanding $8.5 million in moral damages.

The company rejected this request, and the case went to court.

The trial ended in Kristoff's favor: the court ordered him to pay $330,000 for the use of his image, as well as 5% of Nestle's income from coffee sales for the entire period of use of the photo.

The total amount of compensation was a crazy $15.6 million.

However, the sudden wealth was short-lived and the case took an unexpected turn



Nestle appealed, refusing to pay the money, continuing the legal battle. And to the surprise of many... They won the case.

In 2007, a California appeals court unexpectedly overturned the court's decision to award payments to Kristoff, citing the "single publication rule for commercial photographs," which states that the statute of limitations begins when an image is first used.

Because Kristoff filed his lawsuit more than a year after his photo was commercially used in 1998, his claims were deemed time-barred due to the statute of limitations.

As a result, Kristoff lost the entire award. He also had to pay his lawyers a huge amount of money for years of legal battles.

This led to him going into serious debt just to pay for years of lawsuits in which he (seemingly) had a 99% chance of winning because his lawyers said he was right.

And if he had accepted Nestle's initial pre-trial offer of $100,000; an amount 50 times the agreed-upon fee in the contract (plus some percentage), he could have changed his life and the lives of his family.

But Kristoff decided to demand more, but in the end he was left with nothing. His desire for more compensation turned into a complete loss of the money that he could have received.

Who do you think is right in this situation?