An art teacher in Quebec, Canada has been slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit for allegedly selling his students' homework online.
Parents of 10 junior high students are suing the instructor, Mario Perron, as well as the school board in Saint-Lazare, for $1.5 million dollars, Knewz.com has learned.
In January, Perron assigned 96 classmates at Westwood Junior High School to draw each other in the style of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat for an assignment titled "Creepy Portraits."
After turning in their projects in February, some of the students stumbled upon Perron's website and allegedly found that he was selling the portraits in the form of prints and merchandise like coffee mugs, t-shirts and cellphone cases. Some items were priced as high as $174, CBC News reported.
The outlet obtained screenshots of the teacher's website — which has since been taken down — where more than a dozen of the brightly colored drawings can be seen lined up for sale. "Marina's Creepy Portrait" and "Jacob's Creepy Portrait," as they are listed in the screenshots, for example, were apparently selling for $118 each.
A group of parents proceeded to file the lawsuit in Quebec's Superior Court on Friday, March 22, against Perron and the Lester B. Pearson School Board.
The suit alleges that for each student, 31 plagiarized items were listed for sale. It seeks $155,000 per plaintiff, totaling $1.575 million, plus punitive damages.
"We requested $5,000 per artwork that was infringed," one of the parents, Joel DeBellefeuille, told CBC News.
"It will teach them a lesson because they broke our trust," another parent, Edith Liard, added. "The teacher broke the trust of the parents to teach the students."
Under Canada's Copyright Act, statutory damages can range from $500 to $20,000 per infringement.
The lawsuit also requested that Perron write an apology, remove the student artwork from all websites and report any earnings from the allegedly plagiarized pieces. Before the case was filed, a letter sent to the school board detailing similar requests was reportedly ignored.
Liard said the ordeal has discouraged her daughter from pursuing a future in art.
"My daughter loves art, always has been into art, and this year after everything happened, she said to me, 'I don't think I'll do art next year,'" she told CBC News. "I was surprised because she's always been artsy at home before school, and she actually picked Westwood because of their art program."
The school board reportedly told the outlet it "does not comment on internal investigations or human resources issues," but last month said it was looking into the allegations and taking them seriously.
Perron did not respond to repeated requests for comment, the publication added.
"Here we are in a digital age, where families and parents are there to scrutinize everything that [kids] are looking at … but who would have thought that it should have been the parents scrutinizing the teacher?" DeBellefeuille said.