Link: http://www.profootballtalk.com/2008/04/08/leinart-issues-dmca-demand-over-champagne-photo/

By now, football fans have probably heard of the publication of a bunch of photos of Matt Leinart, a quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, cavorting with a bunch of young women in a "party situation".
The photos in question originally generated controversy because of allegations that some of the women might be under legal drinking age (21 in the United States). How on earth the photos could prove that one way or another is a mystery to me.
The fact that a young NFL quaterback regularly parties with young women should be a shock to nobody. However, Matt Leinart might want to read up on the history of other young quarterbacks and their behaviour when they entered the NFL. While Joe Montana and John Elway were keeping a low social profile and letting their throwing and game management skills do the talking on the field, Cade McNown, a first round draft pick a few seasons ago, apparently spent a significant amount of time hanging out with the bunnies at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. Last time I looked, he was out of football after being dumped out of the NFL, his brief career judged to have been a bust.
What is more bizarre is that a lawyer representing Leinart is now threatening websites who published the photos with legal action under the DMCA. He sent a threatening letter to ProFootball Talk, whose owner Mike Florio happens to be a lawyer by trade. Florio was unimpressed by the threat, and he explains the background, the threat letter itself and a conversation with the lawyer here.
Apart from the fact that ProFootball Talk did not actually publish the photos (it merely linked to them), the threat to the website smells of a try-on. For a start, copyright to the pictures initially resides with the photographer, not the subject. Unless Leinart has purchased the copyright from the photographer, he and his lawyer have no legal basis for any DMCA demand. Since the letter to Profootball Talk did not specify that copyright is claimed by Leinart, that reinforces my belief that the letter is a try-on.
However, the bigger picture here is that either Leinart has a fool for a lawyer, or the lawyer has a fool for a client. If you have been photographed cavorting with young women and the pictures are in the public domain, trying to have them suppressed is a pointless exercise, since the genie is out of the bottle. Not only that, but the attempt to suppress them ensures that the story will continue to gain traction and attention. Absent any legal action, the media would lose interest and most readers would probably move on with the rationalization that "boys will be boys".
Threatening legal action on dubious grounds against an NFL news site run by a lawyer is really, really dumb, since it ensures continual airplay for the story, and will allow more people to continue to ask the question of whether Matt Leinart, to use an old phrase, has a million-dollar contract married to a ten-cent head. At the time when he should be keeping a low profile and winning the job of quarterback, he appears to be also carelessly whooping it up with people of dubious merit, and the resulting publicity is threatening to become the main story about him. For at least one party, he appears to have done the equivalent of inviting a guy with a telephoto lens to a nudist colony, and only now, when the resulting pictures are all over the internet, is his lawyer sending try-on threat letters to the media. Dumb, dumb, and dumber.