The Copyright Troll Lawyer and My Sweet Revenge
For the sake of $3,000, they cost their clients over $200,000. Way to go, geniuses. Exposing shady copyright practices.
For the sake of $3,000, they cost their clients over $200,000. Way to go, geniuses. Exposing shady copyright practices.
If you work for a stock photo company, OR if you are a photographer that uses stock photo websites, read these words and heed this warning.
Lawyers aren’t always to be trusted. Be careful what practices you allow to happen under your nose!!
A few years ago I was bumrushed by a copyright troll lawyer’s email.
He and his team of slimeballs were on retainer by a stock photo company.
I cannot mention either of their names due to being gagged legally, that’s part of the deal.
These litigious scavengers employ web spiders to crawl the web for anything they can find, and then email you without any demand for take down and cut straight to demanding far more than the license would normally cost, but just enough to be a real hassle to fight over.
In this case, I could not prove my purchase, as my old Paypal account was gone. If I bought the image, that’s what I would have paid with.
It was going to be a headache to try to prove that, so I caved.
Sometimes when creating my original blogs I would snag images I intended to buy and use their thumbnails as placeholders. Then I replace them later before publishing.
But — I have NEVER paid more than $5-$50 for any single image. Ever.
So I know that the image in question, there is no way it was a $3000 image.
That’s what the price became when they found it on my site and I happened to be a business.
Most copyright holders, myself included, when finding a copyright violation — send a notice for the violator to take it down, a demand to license it formally. Simple as that.
Cutting straight to a ridiculous $3000 demand on an image that otherwise couldn’t have cost more than $50 is what these joyful scamps do.
These drive by robo-litigators threaten to seek monetary damages in different states, you name it. All to make you cave and avoid court.
They will open up the communication saying they can take you for $100,000 or more, but then when you ask to settle …. they offer $3000.
What a deal!!! Haha.
I have found other attorneys that have no shortage of nasty comments about these types of lawyers — who say these scumbags are about as bad as ambulance chasers, only operating in the copyright realm.
These lawyers are to the legal profession what robo-callers are to the advertising industry.
They use automation to mail the letters.
They advertise their services as creating a passive income stream for their clients (the stock photo company, not always the photographer…. read on).
My Sweet Petty Revenge
A little over a year had gone by - and by pure luck - I had a hilarious opportunity to get back at them.
I was good friends with the art director for a major magazine publisher who was contracting with me to help automate their digital marketing because I had previously worked for Adobe in my tech support life.
Irony — they were looking at content from the website whose lawyer had shaken me down. I saw the watermark. Cringe.
Apparently the art buyers had licensed a few photos from this <<unnammable company>> and were thinking of licensing a larger library of media…. for a pretty penny.
They were going to spend over $200,000 +
I decided it was MY DUTY to talk her into something else.
And I did.
I told the art director about my experience with <<unnammable company>> and it made her upset. She turned her nose up at that <<unnammable company>> pretty fast.
<<Unnammable Company>> would have never known either….
Only, I had this nagging suspicion that the photographer whose photo was on my website had probably never heard about the case, and probably never received any money for it.
Now I felt like being a real dick.
I decided to reach out to the photographer to tell him what happened.
After all, I was not gagged from discussing the case with anyone named in the letters, and this photographer was indeed named in the lawyer’s letters.
Here’s the thing people — you should really read the fine print when you upload your photos to a stock photo website.
They may have the legal right to pursue copyright cases without notifying you, on your behalf, and then - they may actually have the right to pocket the proceeds if under a certain amount.
That seems to be what happened here.
The photographer was upset, he apologized to me, and I apologized to him for using his image without permission.
The photographer felt bad, but he was angry with the stock photo company.
He had uploaded photos years ago, and wasn’t really active in monitoring them. He just gets payments every now and then.
Around the time that I paid that shakedown fee, he earned nothing. He was goose-egg ($0.00) for a couple of months.
That means the stock company just straight POCKETED whatever they had received from that lawyer.
The lawyer took his cut, forwarded the rest to the stock photo company, and the stock photo company turned around and jacked the rest.
That is quite a business model there, don’t you think?
I wonder how many photographers they have done this to? Of course, they might never know.
That made this photographer pretty angry. He planned to contact them and threaten them with a lawsuit for pocketing whatever money was to be his.
He said they didn’t have any information to give him and they said that anything that happened was “just part of looking out for the copyrights and interests of their photographers” and they didn’t have a way to find or give him specific info about it.
I have no idea what happened after that, but it doesn’t matter much.
I didn’t violate the gag in talking to him, so hopefully that company got an earful and realizes the scope of how that lawyers actions can impact both them, and their customers, the photographers.
Or maybe not. Maybe they know and don’t care, and the rest is PR.
Had I just purchased photos directly from the photographer, this would never have happened.
Two things to takeaway from this experience :
In shaking me down for $3000, I cost that stock photo company a $200,000 bundle, and who knows how much repeat business thanks to making an art director from a fortune 500 status company hate them.
I build things all the time and sometimes I find photos I want to license.
I certainly will never use <<unnameable company>> ever again.
And that photographer stated that he will never upload his photos to <<unnamable company>> ever again
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ Chris Morton YouTube
#shadypractices #lawyers #litigous #robolawyer #copyright #shakedown #stockphotos #beware #photographer