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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Alex Wild's copyright infringement story on Ars Technica a few months ago provides some helpful context to the linked page.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/one-mans-endless-...

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This is the perspective you need to read that original post Thanks!

While his article talks about "commercial infringement", his FAQ doesn't say that he's restricting his suits to people who are using his work commercially, which is really interesting. In principle he could be suing a lot of people, which is great for him and a great way to subsidize an unusual and interesting creative endeavor.

I assume that Wild has registered copyright on all his works so that his firm can sue for statutory damages (easy) rather than actual damages (harder to prove).

Suppose Wild is reading Quora answers about insects and notices that someone has left a comment where they pasted in a photo from his Web site. Super easy to do. Also super easy for him to send an e-mail to his copyright contractor, and a free $750 (minimum) in statutory damages.

I have registered copyright on works before, very straightforward, opens some unusual opportunities. There's actually a great startup idea here:

(1) Create a large quantity of high-quality unwatermarked stock images. (2) Register copyright on each work. (3) Sell them on a web site and use search-engine marketing tactics to make it a really high ranking Web site. (4) Wait 2.9 years, then sue every Web site and user who picked up the images.

The FAQ, in fact, says something very similar to what you claim it doesn't say:

> If the infringement appears on a personal blog, forum, or web page, I usually ignore it. If I have time, which I generally don’t, I may issue a takedown notice to remove infringing copies from personal sites most likely to feed downstream infringements. If the infringement occurs on a corporate or organizational webpage, product, broadcast, or similar, even if it is just a small internal image, I generally submit it to ImageRights.

Also, in the licensing section of his website

> Social Media - Personal People acting in a personal capacity are welcome to share my photographs on blogs, web pages, and social media accounts without prior permission, provided that all images are accompanied by a link back to www.alexanderwild.com. Failure to attribute an image properly may result in a takedown notice to the web host.

Attribution! A thousand times this. I wish twitter would enforce this policy or add a source field like tumblr on those various 1M+ reddit-scraping picture recycling accounts. @picpedant can't save the stories behind these images all by himself.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2014/02/_historyi...

That is really reasonable. Good for Wild; he seems like a great guy who has his stuff together.

Oh. So it does. Under "How do you decide to enforce a case?". Thanks, sorry, I missed that.

Q. How do you decide to enforce a case?

If the infringement appears on a personal blog, forum, or web page, I usually ignore it. If I have time, which I generally don’t, I may issue a takedown notice to remove infringing copies from personal sites most likely to feed downstream infringements. If the infringement occurs on a corporate or organizational webpage, product, broadcast, or similar, even if it is just a small internal image, I generally submit it to ImageRights.

I am pretty sure if a user posts one of his photos to a forum (like Quora), he can only send a DMCA take down notice. Only if the website owner themselves post the image can they make the copyright claim with damages.

That's true of his relationship with Quora, because it's not their fault, but if he had some way to know who the account belonged to, he could also go after them independently.

If it were just like you described, then nobody would ever be liable for copyright damages, because they'd just say "oh, my brother owns the site, I just posted, so you can't sue either of us."

It's hard to get damages when the infringement isn't commercial. If the violator isn't getting a profit from their use, then there's not much argument that you were going to get money from it - no 'damages', because you wouldn't have profited there anyway.

Don't statutory damages cover that?

That's not true. Statutory damages can be calculated/estimated from the market price of the work, which the copyright holder is missing out on by not getting the sale. Torrenting movies doesn't generate profit for anyone, but you're still liable if the MPAA manages to track you down with enough evidence to bring a suit against an individual.

I guess I was thinking about using photos in things like forum posts. Movies is a different matter - members of the general public routinely pay for movies. Members of the general public don't routinely pay for photos in a forum post - this is not where photographers get their income stream from. Hence hard to prove damages.

And even then, the MPAA, despite it's considerable legal power and ability to get laws altered, still has a difficult time getting damages out of people. "In 2011, for example, the producers for Hurt Locker sued almost 25,000 BitTorrent users—and almost all the claims were voluntarily dismissed by the studio, because it was taking too long to track down all of the defendants via their IP addresses."[1]. That's not difficult for the reasons I said, but it's still difficult, and that's talking about a violently litigious entity with very deep pockets. A regular company or a freelancer is going to have an even more difficult time.

[1]http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/bittorrent-illeg...

Right, it depends on being able to reliably trace the violation to a particular individual. That's hard over bittorrent, not so hard when it's a company's website or a personal blog.

>Members of the general public don't routinely pay for photos in a forum post

Just because lots of people do it doesn't make it right. Rehosting someone else's photo is a violation of their copyright, and should require that you buy a license for the photo. If it's not for sale, then you can't do it, period.

Generally, the DMCA could limit a copyright holder's claims against a website for user generated content to the takedown notice. But the person who posted it can still be fully liable under copyright law. The DMCA does not provide protection for them.

Your "great startup idea" has been done. Google for "righthaven", "US copyright group" and "prenda law". There are a couple of other law firms doing the same thing. It seems to end badly, for some reason, which I suspect is "bad karma", but your mileage may vary.

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