Messages

31

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Fear Being Sued (Too Much)

« on: October 11, 2012, 10:13:39 PM »

Thanks for the post, Robert. Very interesting, and I do agree with the point being made about good lawyers looking after their clients' best interest by keeping them out of court.

32

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New wording and interface on Getty's site

« on: October 01, 2012, 11:33:32 PM »

That may be, nothing wrong with that. We may be giving Getty too much credit — they may not even know why the form has a regional selector. It could be the designer left it in from some template he picked up on the intertubes.

What remains fairly clear is that Getty continues to put on airs of self-importance and puff up their brand in an attempt to justify their ridiculous price structure. Their stuff is just not worth that much money and the fancy license calculator with a cryptic geographic region selector does not really disguise that fact.

33

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New wording and interface on Getty's site

« on: October 01, 2012, 11:17:08 PM »

Yes, Robert, I agree. I didn't mean to suggest a copyright claim could be heard in small claims court, thanks for clarifying that.

Since they seem to try a number of approaches to intimidate people into paying, it's plausible they could try threatening a small claim action when they shift tactics from treating the matter as a legal claim to handling it like a debt collection. Of course they won't even go there anyway. It appears their "debt collection" strategy doesn't have legs because of consumer protection laws.

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Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: New wording and interface on Getty's site

« on: October 01, 2012, 06:48:35 PM »

Good points, everybody. The first thing that came to my mind is how I wouldn't pay $315 for the image even if it was for global rights and for the life of the website. There are a lot of less expensive alternatives if one MUST buy a stock image.

I think part of the intent of the form is to give themselves the air of being some kind of elite media source that sells to all kinds of huge media clients, so they pack their form with important sounding questions that are mostly irrelevant.

I don't see how Getty expects to enforce regional internet licensing boundaries if that's what they're up to. They won't even go to small claims here. At best it's a silly distinction to make, at worst their intention could be to create international "legal" trappings that sound viable on an extortion letter.

35

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: If ever there is a "good" infringement..this is it

« on: October 01, 2012, 05:08:14 PM »

I saw that on the Onion and it cracked me up. I bet it almost fooled a couple of our domestic news outlets.

36

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Alaska Stock - Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

« on: October 01, 2012, 05:06:30 PM »

Good God, Robert. Within 5 hours of Matthew's suggestion you have these guys nailed on a pegboard and perfectly dissected.

Amazing turnaround, great work there! Trolls take note — you could be next.

Robert's post will surely be highly competitive in the search rankings for Alaska Stock soon!

37

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Ending Copyright Extortion Forever -The Impossible Dream

« on: October 01, 2012, 04:59:08 PM »

I did not know Elvis Presley covered this song. The King of La Mancha!

38

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Image not live, but got a letter...

« on: September 27, 2012, 09:11:00 PM »

Greetings, Snowbomb, welcome to the ELI forum. This is the best place to learn about these annoying extortion letters and how you can deal with them.

The short answer to your question is no, you can't right a wrong or undo the infringement. Obviously you don't need to cease and desist from using the image they claim a copyright for since you already took it down. Since copyright law is a strict liability type of law, the infringement happened and voluntary removal of the work does not erase that fact.

Please do tell us more about your situation and consider sharing the letter with this forum. The important thing to understand is that these people are trying to scare you into sending them a check and they may not even have legal standing. Whether or not they have legal standing, they're not likely to take you to court for one image because it's not worth that much trouble to them. Sending you threatening messages is inexpensive and they hope you'll break down and pay them to make them go away.

The members of this forum can help you sort out your options once the specifics of your case are better understood. It would be of interest to the group to learn who sent you this letter and how they claim they "discovered" the alleged infringement.

39

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: an inside peek at picscout

« on: September 24, 2012, 08:28:43 PM »

Scraggy raises an interesting point. Are there any competitors out there for PicScout? There are companies out there that help find plagiarized content (Copyscape, for instance), but I don't think I've heard of other troll-specific image scrapers.

There are other very famous image scrapers out there like PicSearch, but they appear to only be interested in building image search engines. As far as I know they don't provide trolling services. Has anyone heard otherwise?

40

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Free Web Template Case and "Remix" Copyright Law?

« on: September 24, 2012, 08:20:46 PM »

I don't think anyone here is saying an infringement did not happen. The stage at which the website had been developed could be relevant to argue an innocent infringement defense. Not that much harm, not that much foul, not that much should be awarded.

Which is exactly why it's not likely Getty will go to court over this matter. There's little upside in it for them.

41

Hawaiian Letters & Lawsuits Forum / Re: Attorney J. Stephen Street Extortion Letter: Hawaiian Art Network/Vincent Tylor

« on: September 22, 2012, 03:50:16 PM »

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.

42

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Free Web Template Case and "Remix" Copyright Law?

« on: September 22, 2012, 03:30:12 PM »

Jerry, the point is not letting the trolls define the term "published" by default. There isn't really a standard, and it would be good to have a better standard than "it could be stumbled upon against colossal odds, and our bot could find it."

Here's an analogy: if you get a book printed and your cover is infringing a copyright, and you realize this on press check before the book gets out of the print shop, did you really wrong the copyright owner? Maybe a few people on the print floor saw the cover, as did the prepress people and account executives. That doesn't mean the book was published.

Some attention must be called to the whole logic of what their claim is — that they were wronged by someone using their image publicly without a license. If very few people saw the image and it was mostly developers who dropped the project, what's the harm in that?

Unfortunately, most hosting outfits don't hold your access logs more than a few months. It may be part of the trolling strategy to make the screen capture and wait a few months for their tracks to disappear before sending their annoyance letters. For many of the victims it's too late to try to get this kind of proof.

I agree that one should use every defense available even if it may seem like a stretch, especially those that have proven successful in court. The trolls won't listen anyway. The defense scenarios would be useful only if they decide to take one to court, and that has not proven to be very likely.

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Hawaiian Letters & Lawsuits Forum / Re: Attorney J. Stephen Street Extortion Letter: Hawaiian Art Network/Vincent Tylor

« on: September 22, 2012, 02:50:31 PM »

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

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Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Free Web Template Case and "Remix" Copyright Law?

« on: September 22, 2012, 02:30:53 PM »

S.G. raises a good point about the "live" status of the site. The definition of when a site is actually "published" is very ambiguous. The trolls like the loosest standard possible: if they can find it with their targeted searching software and you didn't block their bot, it was "published".

A more reasonable standard would be when the site is submitted to search engines or announced to the public in any other way, such as social networks. The whole issue of a site in development being an infringement as soon as a file is uploaded is questionable to me, especially in the light of the statements made by Getty's CEO about creativity and flexibility.

Couch_Potato, I believe if even a part of the image in question was involved there's still liability. A derivative work is still an infringement if the original work is recognizable. Apparently PicScout recognized the portion that Getty claims they need to get paid for.

The fact that the copyright user was bamboozled by an invalid license helps a defense of innocent infringement or de minimis infringement, but that would come up in court and Getty seems to ignore any such reasoning.

Other proof that may help the innocent infringement defense would be the argument that the site was not really public — and that proof would lie in your server logs. For the most part you should find that the visits to the "published" site were from crawlers like PicScout and the search engine crawlers, and of course the web developers working on it.

A site under construction has virtually no chance to score any kind of rankings for any meaningful search, so finding such a site is an exercise in pure randomness for a mere mortal. Your server logs will prove how few human eyeballs the site actually caught.

So is it really "published" because the public could access it — even though the possibility is ridiculously remote?

I guess you would find out in discovery. They just want to scare you into paying for something you didn't take and didn't use anyway. I wouldn't pay them squat.

45

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: What exact IS Google's DMCA policy?

« on: September 22, 2012, 02:09:52 PM »

Google/YouTube is being inconsistent with their stated guidelines. Content that incites violence is supposed to be a no-no. What standard of proof do they need? It's clear there's absolutely no value to the content.

I'm not sure if they're being chicken or playing chicken. Either way, they should do what they say and say what they do:

We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity).

Source: http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines