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Attorney J. Stephen Street Extortion Letter: Hawaiian Art Network/Vincent Tylor

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Matthew Chan:
After an extended silence, Hawaiian Art Network & Vincent K. Tylor are back once again with a brand-new extortion letter by none other than Attorney J. Stephen Street himself.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106569880/J-Stephen-Street-Settlement-Demand-Letter-Hawaiian-Art-Network-Vincent-K-Tylor

For those of you who don't know, J. Stephen Street is Hawaiian Art Network's attorney on recent lawsuit complaints filed on 4 Hawaiian businesses. However, 3 of them were dropped presumably because they settled.

This extortion letter is interesting because Street spends time on Section 1202 of the DMCA. Additionally, he takes infringements of 2 photos and pumps them up to "18 uses".

Of course, the point of quoting all that verbiage is to overwhelm the legally ignorant into paying up by sheer intimidation.

I guess it's time to find out more J. Stephen Street, his staff, the size of his operation, how he operates, etc.

Moe Hacken:
The registration VA0001696555 is a bulk registration titled "Hawaii 2000" which was loosely entered back in 2009. I don't believe there's much data beyond a list of titles included. Maybe the Copyright Office has a CD with this stuff and it wouldn't surprise if it had the Webshots logo on it.

By the way, there they go again with the totally baseless accusation that the copyright information was intentionally removed so they can make it sound like a criminal matter. They can't prove that and they know it.

By the way, could Uncle Glen and Cousin Vinny tell us which one of these is their copyrighted version?

http://tinyurl.com/8kjyu8f

Jerry Witt (mcfilms):
About 3,380 results.

But we are not seeding.

Oh, lordy.

Moe Hacken:
Disturbing, isn't it?

The Webshots reference is due to my suspicion that some of VKTs earlier works (including the ones in this lawsuit) may have been included in a royalty-free stock image CD roughly 10 years ago. Maybe more than one collection, who knows.

Maybe pass the word around to folks you know who have purchased stock image CDs to see if they know of a copy of any of the "Best of Webshots" CD collections that came out around 2002. Webshots was bought by American Greetings a few years ago and they have no copies of this product. They may turn up on someone's shelf or on Craigslist. These were sold on retail outlets back then.

VKT has been a long-standing member of Webshots and many of these images that have gone insanely viral date back to that period. In many cases the images have spread so much that I would argue it's basically an orphaned work because there's no reasonable way to trace the owner of the copyright and the bulk of the evidence is that it's in the public domain because it's so ubiquitous.

Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi):

--- Quote from: Jerry Witt (mcfilms) on September 22, 2012, 03:08:12 PM ---Oh, lordy.

--- End quote ---

I have to admit, those are NOT the 2 words that came to my mind...more like HOLY F$C%!!

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