Hi, for obvious reasons you know why I am here. I received an email in June from Image Protect on behalf of BWP Media and Pacific Coast News. (Going to keep the name of my site a secret for this public forum)
We were ordered to pay the sum of $1500.00 for the use of a set photo we had posted on our website and server over a year ago in 2016. Which we had received and linked from JustJared.com. Ironically, the initial email only listed one single set photo as being under copyright even though the original article had several other photos listed.
Obvious I had a heart attack because literally days before another film blog that I'm friends with had received a physical letter for the same photos. However, in their case Image Protect had been trying to contact them for over 6 months and obviously, things escalated drastically. In my case the email was only 48 hrs old. But in both our cases our emails were in our spam folder? Nevertheless, my buddies own blog was hit with a $5000.00 settlement claim but somehow got to talk them down to a mere $250 bucks after providing paperwork that he didn't make much from his acutal day time job through tax returns and such.
Now in my cas, however, I immediately thought JustJared.com (who is known for posting set photos with their hideous watermark) was the one who was attacking use but after a bit of digging it was Pacific Coast News. Without any formal Take Down request, they jumped stright to settlement fees. So I started to read up how this has been going on for years. So I started to formualte my responce. I went through the trouble of deleteing ALL set photos from my film blog and deleting the original media files. Headache with Wordpress is in order to make your website to run faster they acutally store the images on their OWN server. (http://1.wp.com) So that was headache just trying to find how to remove them from a place I have no control over. Talking to my web host GoDaddy was a dead end because it's not stored on my server! Luckily, I finally found an email and asked Wordpress to wipe my cache and the image was finally gone from both our servers.
Now a few days passed after I had apologized and promptly removed the images and many more in under 48 hrs. I was then contacted by the rep who would be handling my case "Jenna Nessman" who claimed I needed to provied proof of my lisence or a the settlement fee needed to be paid.
My responded email was a little on the hard side as I stated that the single photo had been removed less than 48 hours on both our sever and the entire article had been removed. That we both knew that according to the "fair use" policy the image is not worth $1500.00 and that would not hold up in court. And that I don't want to be contacted again. Now whether any of that info is true or not (I talked out my ass) I have yet to receive another email since and its been about 2 weeks.
Just a small story to see what to go from here....and see who else has been effected by these trolls.
We were ordered to pay the sum of $1500.00 for the use of a set photo we had posted on our website and server over a year ago in 2016. Which we had received and linked from JustJared.com. Ironically, the initial email only listed one single set photo as being under copyright even though the original article had several other photos listed.
Obvious I had a heart attack because literally days before another film blog that I'm friends with had received a physical letter for the same photos. However, in their case Image Protect had been trying to contact them for over 6 months and obviously, things escalated drastically. In my case the email was only 48 hrs old. But in both our cases our emails were in our spam folder? Nevertheless, my buddies own blog was hit with a $5000.00 settlement claim but somehow got to talk them down to a mere $250 bucks after providing paperwork that he didn't make much from his acutal day time job through tax returns and such.
Now in my cas, however, I immediately thought JustJared.com (who is known for posting set photos with their hideous watermark) was the one who was attacking use but after a bit of digging it was Pacific Coast News. Without any formal Take Down request, they jumped stright to settlement fees. So I started to read up how this has been going on for years. So I started to formualte my responce. I went through the trouble of deleteing ALL set photos from my film blog and deleting the original media files. Headache with Wordpress is in order to make your website to run faster they acutally store the images on their OWN server. (http://1.wp.com) So that was headache just trying to find how to remove them from a place I have no control over. Talking to my web host GoDaddy was a dead end because it's not stored on my server! Luckily, I finally found an email and asked Wordpress to wipe my cache and the image was finally gone from both our servers.
Now a few days passed after I had apologized and promptly removed the images and many more in under 48 hrs. I was then contacted by the rep who would be handling my case "Jenna Nessman" who claimed I needed to provied proof of my lisence or a the settlement fee needed to be paid.
My responded email was a little on the hard side as I stated that the single photo had been removed less than 48 hours on both our sever and the entire article had been removed. That we both knew that according to the "fair use" policy the image is not worth $1500.00 and that would not hold up in court. And that I don't want to be contacted again. Now whether any of that info is true or not (I talked out my ass) I have yet to receive another email since and its been about 2 weeks.
Just a small story to see what to go from here....and see who else has been effected by these trolls.