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 registrationsTL;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may have lied on his copyright registration application by saying that all of his many images in one "collection" were unpublished.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:
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 §410(c), providing the registration constitutes prima facie evidence and we will not need a deposit copy should our client wish to proceed with litigation.
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=sharingNote 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 collectionThe 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 effortsWe 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=sharingThey 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 presenceSince 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=sharingThis 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=sharingSee the who.is registration page: https://who.is/whois/nick-youngson-photography.comThe timing is an unusual coincidence: just two days after we posted our initial thread.
InterpretationYoungson 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 thoughtsThere 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/1v2I0uIyfLcF4PEj1I hope that this new information is useful and I will continue updating the ELI community as we uncover new evidence.
Thank you.