Here's some stuff on the Porter suit.
I only know of this because of
Inside T206, which references it in a footnote but doesn't give much else. It says this is the only known time a T card subject actually sued over the use of their image.
Harry Porter was a subject in the first series of T218, one of the many Irish American Athletic Club members to appear. His card had to have been printed after February 7, 1910, judged by the back text on series 1 cards. Several dates of issue in 1910 are given in the ATC ledger, that are plausible. His card does not appear to have been pulled from production, he's a common card that seems as readily available as any other card to me.
I found a record of the case in an old government compilation of cases before the NY court that year:
https://books.googleusercontent.com/...kJTWw6Kvg6qxwc.
Pages 871-873 of the book cover the Porter case. Porter claimed he did not give his permission for advertising and sued for damages. The text is largely about procedural nuance, and is a decision for November 1910 on an ATC appeal. The case seems to have moved fairly quickly, as this is only a few months after the card could have been issued. American Tobacco claims that Porter did indeed sign a release, on July 5, 1909. The court rules against ATC's procedural motion. There should be a prior and later court event on this case, I think. The exacts of this are probably more clear to our lawyers here than to myself.
The case (Porter v. American Tobacco Co.,125 N. Y. S. 710 (fol.71).) is referenced as precedent in several later decisions in the 1930's. All later references in the ensuing decades seem to be to this motion that Porter won, though this part of the suit does not address the larger issue on which the legal use of his image hinges - did Porter on or about July 5, 1909 give his written consent to American Tobacco, or not?
While interesting and a part of T218 history, I'm striking out on getting anything that tells us much, beyond what we can reasonably infer from the Ball and Hyland letters, of the larger context thus far.