Lawyer For Mother Accused Of Killing Baby, Threatens Separate Lawsuit Over People Copying His Facebook Photos

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Thu, Jul 29th 2010 2:12am — Mike Masnick

Ah, the perils of lawyers confused about the internet. Reader kb alerts us to the news of lawyer Jose Baez, who apparently has received plenty of attention for defending Casey Anthony, a mother who stands accused of killing her 2-year-old child. Apparently, some of the blogs that are reporting on the case pulled some photos from Baez's Facebook profile and Photoshopped them to include in blog posts. Baez's response is to threaten a lawsuit against those bloggers saying it's copyright infringement, while pulling down all of his photos. As kb notes, it appears that this lawyer doesn't seem to understand copyright law, fair use, Facebook's privacy settings or the Streisand Effect in that this effort is only drawing that much more attention to the blog posts he's upset about. Nice work.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: casey anthony, copyright, fair use, jose baez, parody, privacy

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

IronM@sk, 29 Jul 2010 @ 3:14am

Every link below the homepage for BlinkOnCrime is a 404.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
paperbag (profile), 29 Jul 2010 @ 4:17am

ownership
I thought you signed away all your rights to facebook.com for anything you uploaded or included on your profile? Those pictures he uploaded... the copyright belongs to facebook now?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- paperbag (profile), 29 Jul 2010 @ 4:21am
  
  Re: ownership
  Hmm apparently I was mistaken? Or this was old policy. Nothing to see here, move along.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Jeremy Lyman (profile), 29 Jul 2010 @ 5:00am
  
  Re: ownership
  I believe you waive Facebook's liability by permitting non-exclusive rights to display your pictures. That's not giving up your ownership or right to license the images to other parties.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Deirdre (profile), 29 Jul 2010 @ 5:08am

I guess that is the photoshopped picture below the statement in red print:
Disclaimer– exclusive original content copyright and property of Internet Network News, LLC and Blinkoncrime.com. Reproduction of this article , ANY OF IT’S Conclusions, comments or CONTENT, in whole or in part, without proper attribution and source link is strictly prohibited without prior written permission. Onionesque this time, had to. Photo below is a combination of parody and actual images, posted publicly, without copyright or instruction to not 'reproduce.'"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- BearGriz72 (profile), 29 Jul 2010 @ 10:39am
  
  Re:
  I saw that disclaimer too, my thought is good luck with that.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
rabbit, 29 Jul 2010 @ 12:52pm

You know, I've been wondering about this.

I am not a facebook user but I do live in an area where we have a certain tv station that believes if they say facebook at least 50 times in every 60 seconds of a "news" broadcast, they will suddenly become relevant. Every morning this week, for almost every news story, they have been plastering pictures they claim come from facebook. They even revived a "news item" from last month so that they could show us new pictures they found on facebook. ???
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Jessica, 29 Jul 2010 @ 1:33pm

I have a facebook account, and I guess I have to say I'm smart enough to make certain my security settings are set so that only my direct friends can see my pictures. Not even my Friends of Friends, or Anyone.

If he didn't make sure his stuff was secure in the first place... That's his own dam fault.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]