It is obvious they are the same photo, especially the backside. Any jury would believe it, just superimpose the images on top of each other.
The defense isn't that they took the photo themselves, it's that they stumbled upon the photo on a site that misattributed it to a CC license, which is probably exactly what happened. If you do a reverse image search on the original photo, it has been uploaded as-is to hundreds of places: https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en-CA&q=custom+black+hard+pl...
My sympathies are with Netflix here. It's unreasonable to expect them to do a full genealogical search for every random stock photo they use so that they can trace these hundreds of photos back to some Australian blog.
If they got it from some random image search site ("Google Images"), shame on Netflix. A professional stock image site likely wouldn't have featured these images.
I don't know if it is unreasonable. I don't have lawyers working for me, but even I know that you don't just use random images you find from Google image search for commercial purposes. Even for noncommercial but public use can be iffy.
The defense isn't that they took the photo themselves, it's that they stumbled upon the photo on a site that misattributed it to a CC license, which is probably exactly what happened. If you do a reverse image search on the original photo, it has been uploaded as-is to hundreds of places: https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en-CA&q=custom+black+hard+pl...
My sympathies are with Netflix here. It's unreasonable to expect them to do a full genealogical search for every random stock photo they use so that they can trace these hundreds of photos back to some Australian blog.