[celestialcheese]

This is so common, and has been for a number of years.

As an owner of a website with a lot of content published over the years, a copyright claim pops up with "settlement" offers between $200-$1k to make it go away.

50% of the time it's an outright scam like this.

45% it's legit, we pay the settlement, and a writer gets a reminder about citing images and copyright.

5% is the worst, where a photographer will have a open license like CC BY-NC, then a law firm will contact photographers with images licensed like that, and partner with them to send demand letters to businesses improperly using the open license and do the settlement shakedown. While technically in violation because we're a business with ad revenue, it's nefarious because it's exploiting nuances of open licenses and writers on schedule missing the NC part of the license review. We get it right most of the time, but mistakes happen. Feels dirty to leverage CC to make money doing copyright shakedowns.

[duskwuff]

> 5% is the worst, where a photographer will have a open license like CC BY-NC

Doesn't even have to be -NC. Creative Commons licenses require reusers to provide comprehensive[1] attribution when they reuse images. Some older versions of the license, like 2.0, also terminated immediately and permanently upon any breach of the license; copyright trolls have abused this to sue reusers who forgot to include some part of the required attribution. CC 4.0 provides the reuser a 30-day grace period to cure a violation.

[1]: "the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material", as well as the title of the work prior to 4.0 -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en#ref-appr...

[celestialcheese]

Yup. Haven't had this specific type of complaint levied against us, not looking forward to that payout.

And we do our best to comply with the letter of all the different open licenses, but it's hard as a small pub with a writing staff.

[dawnerd]

As a counter point feels dirty to abuse photographers not catching NC for you to profit.

[celestialcheese]

Really? So in your world, a writer's mistake is abuse, in the same way legal professionals using the copyright system to profit off of a small publishing businesses is?

It's like arguing that punitive fines for minor infractions, like jaywalking or speeding, would be justified because "you broke the law".

The outrageous maximum penalties ($100k/infringement), the nuance of fair use and copyright law, and the resulting cost of defending yourself means that the only solution if you don't have excellent in-house counsel is you have to settle for what they ask. It's legal extortion.

[Cheezemansam]

>A writer's mistake is abuse

I thought we were talking about companies. Why should the owner of the work care about whether your writer was on too tight of a timeline to properly check whether they were allowed to use the photographer's work for free? Yes, a company stealing people's work is abusive, and I am not sure why we should be sympathetic when some small % of them happen to have aggressive representation.

[dawnerd]

Whats abuse is taking advantage of the fact that copyright law is complex and knowing that they don't know they could go after you.

I think we're in agreement that the current copyright system is a joke. It's too complicated and there's too many loopholes that can be exploited.

[gnopgnip]

Running an image on a website with ads doesn't necessarily make it commercial use.

A good way to look at it is like a newspaper. Using an image related to the content of an article is editorial, the primary purpose is to educate, entertain or inform. This is true even if for a newspaper that charges money. But using an image in an ad, in a way that endorses a product or creates a relationship or advertises a product is commercial use.

[celestialcheese]

That's an argument, and maybe one that could convince a judge. But good luck getting to make that argument for less than 6 figures in legal costs.

Which is why this scam is so profitable.