ELI Forums > Higbee Associates Letter & Lawsuits Forum
Nicholas Youngson Photographer (Rep. by Higbee Associates) Copyright Abuse
nycopyrightabuse:
Matthew Chan, thanks for taking the time to reply to my thread. Truthfully, I debated for a few days whether or not to reach out to you privately before writing my initial post. I should have trusted my gut instinct and done it.
I am not a lawyer and only represent a U.S. based company. The company decided to conceal the identity because our situation is ongoing and we didn't feel comfortable fully disclosing company matters that may turn into litigation. I also completely understand and agree with the merits of your post.
We are asking for the ELI community's help and agree that there isn't much information from us except for the linked documents we provided. You are right that this does present inherent risk for anyone who contacts us. To our credit, we stated multiple times that any information provided would not be used or published - and we encouraged others to redact information they didn't feel comfortable sharing.
With that being said, I want to express an apology if my initial post seemed like it was an "information honeypot." It was not my intent and I understand your concern. I will be replying to your personal email shortly to address the matter privately - something I should have done at the start.
Thanks you.
nycopyrightabuse:
Matthew, I replied to your email (as promised) and look forward to providing details and information in order to verify my positive intentions and objectives with the community. I appreciate your adherence to the community's best interests with regards to safety and also look forward to getting the email address reinstated on my original post.
Thank you.
Matthew Chan:
NYCopyrightrightabuse,
I have received your email and will respond personally there. Once we hammer out the details and issues, I think we should be fine.
IN a general sense, I do like that you are being proactive, strongly voiced your position/opinions, and taken the initiative to do something. I am not giving an endorsement of what you are doing or your arguments but I do respect that you are not sitting back and letting yourself or your client become blindly victimized.
I will offer this nugget to anyone regarding receiving the Higbee letters regarding Youngson's photos. There is a tremendously disproportionate number of Higbee letters and Nick Youngson letters showing up. There is something not right about this.
At least Getty Images, Masterfile, and other stock photo agencies have an "excuse" to send out large numbers of letters. Because they have such a huge library of images from which people can infringe upon.
But the Youngson image issue appears to be VASTLY because of "gotcha infringements". The majority of victims are making an attempt to find appropriate Creative Commons images to use but getting tripped up on the attribution issue. And because of that, people are getting bullshit $5,000 "speeding tickets" for goofing up the attribution issue with little or no advance warning.
So whether it is intentional or unintentional, there is a honeypot situation that exists as far as I am concerned. And it appears to me that these $5,000 demands are taking UNFAIR advantage of that situation. And that is what is creating the outrage right now. The Higbee operation is being followed and reported very closely.
It seems in the near future, there might be a dedicated Higbee Letter Forum due to the significant numbers of people I am hearing from.
Essentially, the best thing for Youngson image victims to do is spread the word on this trap.
Regarding the anonymity issue, I have no problems with people posting anonymously as long as they do so in a responsible way. Some people and websites abuse the anonymous posting privilege which is why I am vigilant and watchful on the matter.
nycopyrightabuse:
Matthew Chan, thank you very much for the speedy reply and note about us being proactive. I look forward to hammering all of the details out in a swift fashion and to your satisfaction. I agree with the entirety of your post and think that the Higbee letters do deserve their own forum.
Indeed, the Higbee/Youngson complaints are a different animal because the enterprise was designed to trap innocent people into using images they thought were free for use. Nicholas Youngson is not in the photography business -- he's in the settlement collections business, and he has partnered with Higbee and Associates to handle the paperwork.
I was going to wait for our next reply from Higbee before making an update, but think now is a good time to disclose some new information our research team discovered in the last week. The items listed below have serious implications for many Higbee demand letter victims and give insight into how the ELI community is making a serious impact on their nefarious operations.
Update 1. A closer look at Youngson's copyright registrations
TL;DR - summary Youngson may have lied on his copyright registration application by saying that all of his many images in one "collection" were unpublished. Finding one image in his collection before the date of June 10, 2016 may invalidate his entire copyright to the collection.
Long answer. In our recent correspondence with Higbee's office, we asked for the full copyright registration of the images in question - including the certificate AND visual assets. Jeremy C. refused to provide this and replied with the following:
--- Quote ---Hello, What you are requesting is a deposit copy. Please contact the US Copyright Office with your request. They will provide what you are seeking in the form of a CD. There is a fee and a lengthy turn around [sic]time. Please be advised that per 17 USC ยง410(c), providing the registration constitutes prima facie evidence and we will not need a deposit copy should our client wish to proceed with litigation.
--- End quote ---
This response is designed to add more duress (stress) to the situation and pressure the victim to submit to the nuisance settlement demand.
However, the problem is that we didn't dispute the validity of their copyright registration. We wanted evidence that the disputed images actually belong to the certificate they provided. This is an important concern: the copyright registration certificates they submit with their demand letters include many images under a generic title.
Consider the fact that for three distinct (and visually contrasting) images we were accused of infringing, there is one registration certificate with the following unique identification information:
* Copyright registration number VAu 1-248-878
* Title of work: still-images-16-06-10
* Effective date: June 10, 2016
* Basis for registration: unpublished collection
Link to copyright registration certificate: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ZbRXn38e7SX3FLTDJXNTd6Vjg/view?usp=sharing
Note a few things:
* "Still images" is not descriptive enough to justify that an image is indeed part of the registration.
* "Unpublished collection" means that ALL of the images in the entire collection (most likely hundreds) were not on the internet and available when it was registered (Copyright statute).
Given that Mr. Youngson has been selling his images for many years, it's hard to believe that he would create hundreds (maybe thousands) of images as part of a collection and wait until they were all done and copyrighted to publish them online (in June of 2016). It makes sense why he would do it as a collection - to save money on copyright registration fees.
The opportunity - to invalidate Youngson's entire copyright collection
The Copyright law statute is clear in asserting that if you lie or misrepresent facts on your application that (1) you face a financial penalty up to $2,500.00 and; (2) your copyright registration is invalid.
So, if any one of the images in the entire collection was published online (available to the public in any way), it is possible that Youngson's entire copyright collection may be invalid (because he lied on his copyright application). Maybe someone from the community can find it?
Our internal research efforts
We have tried to locate the images, but it's difficult because Youngson is refusing to provide the original registration documents. We are currently waiting for their reply to our request and may have to request it from the copyright office ourselves (at a high fee).
We tried to ping earlier versions of Youngson's Origin and Mirror websites using Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://nyphotographic.com/
However, he has settings that disable indexing. See screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ZbRXn38e7SWUdNNklEakNNREU/view?usp=sharing
They have also refused to answer why they don't want to provide full copyright registration. After all, a court would force them to in the case of litigation.
Update 2. A new Youngson website to combat ELI's search engine presence
Since we started this thread the Youngson/Higbee camp has responded in a clever way. They noticed that when you Google terms like "Nicholas Youngson" the main results are for the ELI forum threads:
Google search results for term "Nicholas Youngson": https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ZbRXn38e7SWW9uWlVleGpSM0E/view?usp=sharing
This is bad for their settlement collections business as it means fewer people will take their demand letters seriously. Plus, Nicholas is earning a solid reputation of being a copyright troll. Just imagine Youngson's plight if you were in his shoes: when people Google your name, they see search results for "extortion letter info" and negative comments about your character/business practices.
Well, Youngson has made a move. He recently registered the domain name http://www.nick-youngson-photography.com on February 19, 2017.
See the who.is registration screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ZbRXn38e7STDQ0YWd0RGpVUUU/view?usp=sharing
See the who.is registration page: https://who.is/whois/nick-youngson-photography.com
The timing is an unusual coincidence: just two days after we posted our initial thread.
Interpretation
Youngson registered this domain name to combat the negative search results about him and his business. My company is thoroughly trained in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and knows how it works: to get high rankings for certain terms you should provide content relevant to the topic and use keywords associated with it. Well, Youngson's new website is a blog (no images for sale as of February 23, 2017) focusing on posts related to the following keywords: copyright, images, Nicholas Youngson, Creative Commons License...etc.
The intent is clear: he is trying to control search engine results with his name to reduce visibility of good information related to ELI and his business practices. Luckily, the ELI forums are a relevant and trusted source of information about his operations - more relevant than his own websites according to Google's intelligent search ranking algorithms.
Call to action for the ELI community: Reading the posts on this forum are not enough; consider registering an account and post your input on these matters in the appropriate thread (while following the forum guidelines set forth by Matthew Chan of course) to ensure that these tangible sources of information continue to rank higher in Google search results for Nicholas' related search terms.
Final thoughts
There are many holes and issues with Youngson's business practices and the validity of his copyright registrations. I intend on providing more useful data as our research team uncovers new evidence.
Since our research and correspondence is ongoing, we humbly ask the ELI community to continue submitting our Google Form replies for incident data. Again, you don't have to provide identification information if you are not comfortable with it. We just want to collect data on how often this situation is happening to other people in order to build our case. We won't share or use your information other than for compiled statistics - nothing else.
Report your Higbee demand letter incident: https://goo.gl/forms/1v2I0uIyfLcF4PEj1
I hope that this new information is useful and I will continue updating the ELI community as we uncover new evidence.
Thank you.
nycopyrightabuse:
Update: He has another new site which distributes images from the origin site: http://www.creative-commons-images.com/nick-youngson-nyphotographic-com.html
He seems to be very active with his development work.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version