You are reading the words of someone who is destitute. At least on paper. Yesterday I got another letter - a 3 page one about my unauthorised use of an image more than 5 years ago. For which they want me to pay them £300. And if I want to keep using it I need to pay them another £200. No doubt they will add the cost of writing the letter to their legal costs. I've never made a penny writing for the web. But that makes no difference to them that there is no turnover to raid.
I have been writing for the web for 10 years now. This blog alone has over 1000 posts on it. Usually with at least one image sometimes 2. It is not my only blog.And between 2000 and 2005 I gradually grew a website with monthly posts. Usually with 5-6 images in them. Say that half of them (a very conservative estimate) are digital images protected by copyright. Then my liability suddenly rises to over £400,000. If they all track me down and demand their money I'm wiped out. This came about because my common practice is to do a google search and to copy and paste images into my blog or web pages. If an image is clearly marked copyright then I don't use it. I wouldn't borrow it and carefully remove the copyright notices on it. That's asking for trouble.
Now my take on all of this has been that if I am found in breach of copyright then I should be sent a cease and desist notice. If I don't take it down then and only then should the copyright holder claim their rights. This isn't happening. Even though the image is not marked as copyright. And has been processed so its a different shade from their original. Even though it isn't clear from which site it was taken and how long it has been on my site that I am liable for the lease of that image during that time. Nor do either parties know how many people have seen the image if at all. Ignorance is no excuse apparently.
This is the equivalent of being given a second hand car discovering that it was in fact a stolen rental car. And being charged for all the lost rental revenue since it was stolen. You can see that this practice is ruinous. Apparently the copyright holder has no responsibility to mark the image as theirs, to prevent it being listed by the search engines or to prevent it being downloaded. The risk is entirely mine. I don't grudge the photographer his income but if he had requested £200 for a 6K GIF then believe me I would have turned him down on the spot.
The legalese now descending on my shoulders quotes legislation from which country I really don't know. The original demand required me to pay VAT as per the Irish rate. The last letter came from the USA.
So what is this broken man going to do? Firstly let them come and make a proper claim through a petty claims court in the UK. I took down the image as soon as I was told it didn't belong to me. So once informed I gave the rental company back their car. We'll see what a local magistrate makes of this. Secondly I shan't pay. If I pay once then I am obligated to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds. I don't propose to stop taking images which are not marked with copyright - the internet would come to a grinding halt if we had to get permission for every single piece of content we use. So that's a jail sentence I think. Bring it on.
I could of course engage the services of a copyright lawyer. But this game is all about making lawyers money. So I don't propose to do that. Has anybody any suggestions as to how they would proceed if they were in my shoes?
