ExtortionLetterInfo Forums
ELI Forums => Getty Images Letter Forum => Topic started by: James83 on December 16, 2014, 12:53:46 PM
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You remove a image from your website after receiving a letter, you ignore them.
Years pass, what proof do they have other than a easy alterable jpeg of your website?
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They might be able to find copies of your site, as of a particular date, on some site that archives the web, such as the www.waybackmachine.org.
If you do not explicitly ask them to remove copies, this would be a way to provide third party evidence of what once was.
This is a particular sore spot with me because Getty has specifically removed large sections of their web presence over the years from archive sites like the waybackmachine. The sections they have removed may justify the legal arguments of alleged copyright violators that the images that were removed were available for free at a particular time in history, and Getty changed their policy.
I have not been pushed so far as to check if a subpoena could get at the information the waybackmachine does not share. My guess is that they don't save it - if they were requested to remove it.
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besides the wayback machine ( archive.org) there is also domain tools which also archive sites and is more difficult to get removed.. They could also have a copy of the code of your site from when the infringement occurred, but this is highly unlikely, because if they had the code and looked at the code, they would actually realize that many of the letters they send out, have zero merit, as many of them are hot linked images.. Usually they only have a screen capture, which would most likely not stand up in court. They have to prove their case, and yes screen captures are easily eidtted/ changed, and screen shots also don't tell us if the image actually resided on the servers in question.
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It sounds like a foreign case but it is not, Telewizia Polska v. Echostar Satelite Corp ruled that screen captures are not admissible as evidence.