Alert – A new and effective form of Internet thievery has you in its gunsight right now

Have you ever copy and pasted an image that wasn’t obviously copyrighted onto a website you own?

I’m sure you and several billion people have done that over the decades.

It seems unbelievable that after 30 years some sc*mbag attorneys are profiting from going after and financially assaulting individuals and small businesses that may have a few copyrighted images on their low-traffic websites, but the day has come.

Here’s how it works:

Using AI, they scan your site and if one of their “client’s” images comes up, you get a demand letter for hundreds of dollars for each image. How serious it is? I’m told that they are assembling a network of attorneys who are geared up to take the cases to court for thousands of dollars for each image if you don’t pay up.

By the way, the copyright owners involved have zero apparent interest in licensing their images or building systems to make it easy to for people to give them money to license their images. That would take work. Instead, they’ve decided this sleaze ball method is the ideal way to make money with image rights.

Right now only a few dirtbag companies are collaborating with legal vermin this way (most notably Agence France-Presse which has a big photo library), but this parasitic, anti-social operation is very lucrative and I’m sure it will metastasize like a cancer.

Can’t you just see people doing a search of the most copied and pasted images on the Internet, tracking down the owners, and collaborating with them on this theft-without-a-gun operation?  Please, no one tell Nathan Myhrvold, the “famous” ex-Microsoft “visionary” patent troll. Of course, he might already be in the game. Heck, he might have even invented it.

So what’s the action step for you?

Simple, but annoying.

Go through every site that has a connection to you and if there is an image you don’t know the copyright status of, don’t have a license for, or didn’t create yourself, get rid of it – and soon, like now. The Internet will be a poorer place for it, but you won’t get hit with a $500 bill for a $5 image.

System Club members got a detailed warning about this earlier, but this one is too important not to share.

– Ken