Click Official ELI Links
Get Help With Your Extortion Letter | ELI Phone Support | ELI Legal Representation Program
Show your support of the ELI website & ELI Forums through a PayPal Contribution. Thank you for supporting the ongoing fight and reporting of Extortion Settlement Demand Letters.

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - stinger

Pages: 1 ... 42 43 [44]
646
By my count, Getty's strategy is to seed the market with actionable items it can later pursue.

Call me paranoid, but it wouldn't surprise me if Getty's long term lawsuit planning department didn't come up with the idea for the share button.  They are going to have to do something to make up for the revenue this web site is costing them.

647
Is there anything we can do to support Aloha in this?

There defense seems similar to what any of us Getty Letter recipients should/could use. 

648
Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Don't get mad, get even
« on: March 06, 2012, 11:56:20 AM »
My thought was that you need a law firm that specializes in class action suits on a contingency basis.  It seems there are a lot of them chasing Wall Street lawsuits.  And they always get paid before the plaintiffs.

How deep are Getty's pockets?  And is there a law firm interested in signing up plaintiffs and taking this on?  This forum seems like a great place to sign up a class without too much difficulty.

649
Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Don't get mad, get even
« on: March 06, 2012, 10:15:06 AM »
I agree with your comments about "frivolous waste of our time", and I too am not a lawyer, however some things here just seem really wrong.

For example:
  • if Getty's business model is to saturate the market with photos that are apparently free and advertised by Getty as royalty free, and then come back later and sue for prices that are 3 orders of magnitude larger than those photos are worth, is that fraud?
  • if Getty's business model is to copyright images that others have already used and then go back and sue (for prices that are 3 orders of magnitude larger than the photos are worth) for use prior to the copyright application, I guess that is within the DMCA, but is it right?
  • is it right to make no attempt to protect a copyright and then sue for extraordinary amounts when people unwittingly use things that appear copyright free and are almost promoted as such?

650
Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: Don't get mad, get even
« on: March 05, 2012, 11:03:08 AM »
It wasn't my petition.  I found it by doing a google search in trying to research/defend my position after receiving an extortion letter.  I don't know where the money goes.

I have to think the amount of chatter out there over this matter needs to be seen by the courts.  I don't know how the petition will be used, but I hope for the common good of readers here.

Do any of the lawyers on this board know if there are any grounds for filing a class action suit against Getty and McCormack for their frivolous waste of our time?

651
Getty Images Letter Forum / Don't get mad, get even
« on: February 23, 2012, 03:44:58 PM »
If you haven't already done so,
  • Sign this petition http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/boycott-getty-images/
  • Ask your friends on social network sites to sign the petition.
  • Tell them if they don't know why they should, just google Getting images extortion letter and they will know.
  • Ask them to share the petition with all their friends

652
Thanks S.G.  You are a big help.

653
Thanks for your thoughts S.G.

My thought was that allowing copying of images from a site where they were not designated as protected by copyright was some sort of "failure to protect a copyright".  Most high school photographers today prevent copying images off the web site you order them from.

Imagine this site http://www.gettyimages.com/CreativeImages/RoyaltyFree without:
  • the paragraph about pricing
  • a shopping cart built around the images you can link to, and
  • watermarks built into the images.

I am not sure it was a business model so much as poor web developers more interested in getting their content out there than protecting it.  The result was it may have fooled lots of people into grabbing what they thought were free pics.

I am somewhat interested in the statute of limitations.  We only used the images to dress up monthly customer newsletters and ended that practice in April of 2007 when we became aware that the photos were not indeed free.  We of course, left the newsletters on our web site where customers could search for articles in them, but we had no links to those newsletters.  I'm guessing that since the newsletters could be found by Getty's bots, even though they are dated April 2007 and before, the state of limitations does NOT save us?

654
Although I cannot be 100% sure of this, both myself and my ex-marketing director believe that in 2005 Getty's royalty free images web site:
  • did not speak of license fees, and
  • allowed visitors to search for pics, with no copyright notice, right click and save them to their device.
I am in the software business and decades ago was warned by attorneys to never let the case be made that our software was in the public domain, because if we did, we would lose our copyright.

In April of 2007, we stopped using photos from that site.  Both my ex-marketing director and myself remember him coming into my office to tell me that the free photos were no longer free and were exorbitantly priced.  I think that was when Getty changed the site to a shopping cart.

I tried to verify what we remember by going to archive.org, but Getty will not allow them to archive that page prior to 2009.  Is there anywhere else I can go to see what that page looked like in 2005.

I feel like a complete sucker.  They put the pics out there, told us they were free, said nothing about copyright, then changed the rules and now are demanding close to $50,000 for infringements that stopped taking place over 5 years ago.

Does anyone else recall getting their images free from getting and now being trolled?

Pages: 1 ... 42 43 [44]
Official ELI Help Options
Get Help With Your Extortion Letter | ELI Phone Support Call | ELI Defense Letter Program
Show your support of the ELI website & ELI Forums through a PayPal Contribution. Thank you for supporting the ongoing fight and reporting of Extortion Settlement Demand Letters.