Stupid Law Firm Decides To Threaten Something Awful Over Hot-Linked Hitler Picture
from the fools-for-attorneys:-non-pro-se-edition dept
A stupid law firm supposedly specializing in IP rights enforcement has decided (again!) to jam its dangling appendages into one of the internet's more ferocious hornets' nests. When you're in the business of threatening litigation over hot-linked images (yep), you probably don't pay much attention to the URLs you target.
The law firm of Higbee & Associates should know better than to go to this well twice. But it doesn't. Due diligence doesn't seem to be a priority. If it was, some of its "pre-litigation" specialists might have noticed the firm went after Something Awful in 2015 for using an image from Under the Skin in its review of the movie. Obviously, this was fair use and a little bit of web searching turns up multiple uses of the same image, suggesting it had been made available by the studio for promotional purposes.
You'd think one failure to turn Something Awful (SA) into an ATM would have been enough for Higbee & Associates. Apparently not. Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka -- having taken over SA's legal department after the departure of Leonard "J" Crabs -- received a demand letter from the law firm over the supposedly unauthorized use of a picture of (go figure) Hitler.
The law firm apparently thought the threat letter would result in Kyanka cutting a check to prevent being sued for up to and including $150,000. But the firm's stupidity goes further than simply trying to threaten a site it had failed to threaten successfully in the past. The demand letter references an image not hosted by Something Awful but one posted to a forum thread by an SA member.
Here's Kyanka's take on the legal conundrum posed by Higbee's ridiculous letter.
As you can clearly see, I had been given a bill for nearly $7,000 because somebody on the Something Awful forums linked to an image of Hitler, a file being hosted on the third-party site Imgur. "Now wait a minute Rich 'Lowtax' Kyanka," you may be saying to nobody in particular. "How can you possibly get sued for somebody linking to an image hosted on a third party site?" The answer is simple: because Higbee and Associates exist.
This garbage dicked law firm generates nearly $5 million a year by encouraging photographers to sign up with their company, then performing a reverse image search for anything matching their client's submitted photos. An automated system then flags the suspected offending site, spits out a super scary legal threat based off a template, and delivers it to the site owner. Upon receiving the notice of possible legal action, many victims freak out and pay these idiots the stated arbitrary amount of cash, under the looming threat of being taken to court for $150,000. Higbee and Associates operate one of the biggest dirtbag law firms to ever pollute the internet, preying on fear and dealing in bulk.
Unfortunately, in my 20 years of running this site, I've been forced to brush up on general copyright law, and I damn well know that linking to an image hosted on a third party image site breaks absolutely no law, even if it is digital, lossy compressed Hitler.
Kyanka's immediate response to Higbee's threat letter is both hilarious and profane, mostly simultaneously.
I have an even better idea: I'm not going to pay you a fucking dime and you can go fuck off to hell for eternity because I am absolutely in no way responsible for images hosted by a third party service, in this case Imgur. Go fuck yourselves and prey on some other website that hasn't been around for two decades and knows damn well what their legal responsibilities entail, and what they're responsible for. Your entire law firm is a straight up piece of flaming shit that tries to intimidate folks with EXPENSIVE LEGAL THREATS in the hope that your extortion scheme will work on some of them. I am not one of those people. So I cordially invite you to take your pdf, print it out, and ride it like a sybian until the cows come home. Then I invite you to fuck the cows as well.
The staff at Higbee's was presumably not amused, nor willing to ride threat letter PDFs like marital aids for the rest of eternity. It handed over Kyanka and his angry communications to one of its "pre-litigation" people so they, too, could harvest the vitriol from the seeds the firm had planted. A few more rounds of law firm employees hoping to sound serious and threatening being greeted with disdain, mockery, and creative insults followed.
Finally, Kyanka decided to do the firm's due diligence for it.
Oh, and since I'm such a swell guy, I'll send you a little graphic explaining Imgur's copyright and linking policies, which clearly dictates the copyright responsibility for each and every image is the sole responsibility of the individual who uploaded it. I'm sure it was just a freak accident that you guys somehow missed the literal first search result for "copyright law and internet image links Imgur," but it's not like you guys are lawyers whose sole job is to do such things as required by the law. Here's the link as well; let me know if you require explicit, step by step instructions detailing how to click internet links.
Maybe this finally got through to the Higbee & Associates. There have been no further legal threats issued since this last salvo by Kyanka. This is the way it should be, minus all the unpleasant interactions preceding this. A hotlinked image isn't a violation of anyone's copyright. The violation, if any, was committed by the person who uploaded the image to Imgur, not the forum poster who linked to it. A DMCA notice sent to Imgur should have been the full extent of Higbee's actions, but instead it decided to subject itself to public mockery by handling this like an overeager hobbyist, rather than the capable law firm it imagines itself to be.
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Filed Under: copyright, copyright trolling, dmca, hitler, hotlinked
Companies: higbee & associates, something awful
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When wankers wank, they wank to the utmost, expect more wanking
A likely theory for their lack of follow through on this claim is that they are busy trying to figure out if they can make a defamation claim over the response. A response which is purely opinion and none defamatory facts. Which does not mean they won't try.
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Knowing Somethingawful...
Though I think it would be more entertaining to get this whole thing on Last Week Tonight so the world can know this law firm exists and is generally toothless.
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"Officer of the court????"
Too bad the bar won't respond with sanctions for such frauds.
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Said every lawyer forced to defend against copyright claims both frivolous and legitimate.
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Now if only the ones sending said claims would do the same, a whole lot of stupidity could be avoided.
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What parts of the Techdirt article or Lowtax’s missives constitute defamation?
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"on the basis of the demand letter, your law firm is the scum of the earth and you deserve to be disbarred" cannot be slander. You can disagree...think the law firm is an angel on account of the letter...but it's not slander.
"*Somehow* Mr Kavanaugh got confirmed, and you, scumbag, were behind it" might be slander, since it assumes facts not in evidence.
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(I assume that's what you meant, since Dumbass & Associates accusing random unrelated people of copyright infringement is the most slanderous thing in this story.)
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"I do not know" ... this is apparent and is not a problem assuming one has an open mind.
"I am not a lawyer" ... neither are a lot of others but that should not stop one from thinking.
"sounded like slander to me."
What do you think slander sounds like? How does one determine the difference between opinion and slander?
Inquiring minds what to know.
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Slander: You are a fish
It comes down to if you are stating something (I think, I am told etc.) vs saying something as a fact.
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Also, throwing invective around can help. Underwood Dudley wrote books about mathematical cranks, and when one of them sued them, the court said that "crank" is dismissive of an idea and the person who holds it, so it's opinion, not slander. For a similar reason, Penn & Teller called their show "Bullshit", because it may be slander to call something fraudulent, it can't be to call it bullshit. Saying "you're a goddamn Nazi scumsucker" is more likely to pass a court than "you're a member of the American Nazi Party", which is likely to be taken as a literal claim of fact.
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Obviously
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Also... Hitler
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Re: Also... Hitler
I recall reading a few years ago about how the German copyright on Hitler's book expired which allowed people to publish it again (something the German government or someone else had previously prevented by buying up the copyright and refusing to print more books of it).
The book was published before Hitler died yes, but any pictures of Hitler in question can't be much newer then it.
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Re: Re: Also... Hitler
A good example of how an author's own copyright can be weaponized against them. (Well, maybe not a good example when the author is Hitler.) He should've put it in the public domain.
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Re: Re: Re: Also... Hitler
If memory serves (from some documentary or other), Mein Kampf became practically required to buy by all German families, thus giving Hitler and his cronies the money from every copy sold. Made him quite a little bundle there.
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Re: Re: Also... Hitler
And, of course, the copyright on the photo likely belonged to the photographer. So (assuming that the photographer survived WWII), there is likely to be several decades between the death of Hitler and the death of the photographer, and therefore several decades between the relevant copyright expiration dates.
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Not if the major corporations get their way. They've already robbed literature, music and movies from the public domain, why not photographic record of historical figures?
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But...this still smells of extortion, courts please take notice!
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How not to troll SA
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Remember kids
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Isnt there a way??
And I would love to see their ownership of the original picture..
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Forget copyright, the offense here is barratry
It used to be grounds for disbarment.
Maybe it isn't any longer a crime, and if so -- too bad
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Re: Forget copyright, the offense here is barratry
Regarding disbarment, you can show how much of a joke that is, and why lawyers like this are likely not worried about it in the least with one word:
Prenda.
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I think we shoudl have one... but for people targeted with the stupidest threats like this.
If they had to pay for their baseless threats, perhaps that might motivate them to change how they operate since it seems the bar, courts, legal scholars won't apply pressure to them to stop being stupid.
Hell imagine what would happen to every firm using Guardaley, who don't have the evidence they claim & are allowed to run away time & time again after costing victims cash. If they had to pay for meritless claims the model would end and bad lawyers could go back to boiler room operations trying to shake down people over bad written off debt.
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