So You received a copyright infringement letter – now what?

by | Feb 7, 2023 | Copyrights, Intellectual Property, Internet, Technology and Privacy Law

You get home and in your mail is a letter, typically from a law firm – accusing you of infringing some obscure copyrighted image you posted on a blog, website or other online location – often one you posted many years before.  It asks for a large payment (at least to you) – often several thousand dollars – to remedy the past alleged infringement.  Many times the law firm sending the letter is a one trick pony – this is all they do – that is to say, they literally make money by threatening (and suing) small alleged infringers.  If the law firm is a real firm – that is to say, they do other things and are enforcing rights of a smaller client as an example, then you probably should take it more seriously.

These copyright holders are often referred to as “copyright trolls” – in reference to their modus operandi of putting copyrighted material on the web – often easy to download, with hidden or hard to find license terms, and then scouring the web and sending these letters, in the hopes that a number of recipients just pay up – because it’s too expensive to hire lawyers.  Done incorrectly by the troll . . . and they can go to jail.  However the trolls often have enough evidence that the claim appears facially valid – and coupled with the possibility of a lawsuit or losing, and the high cost of lawyers – probably a lot of people just pay.  What should you do?

One option of course is do nothing and ignore it . . . and while in many cases the copyright holder might never actually sue you – there is a risk that they do sue you – and often that suit might be in a remote court.  At that point it will probably cost a lot of money to defend it, or settle.  Copyright cases must be brought only in federal court.  So step 1 is to check PACER, and see how “litigious” the plaintiff is. If the plaintiff actually follows through and sues, it is obviously more risky to do nothing. We also recommend internet searching the plaintiff and the lawyer.  Often you may find others who have won, or otherwise successfully defended against them – or worse, you might discover they are “Prenda like” (see the link above) and then you would definitely consider rejecting their offer or reporting them to the authorities for extortion.

Step 2 is to investigate what you did, when you did it, and where you did it.  We have handled many of these cases. A common statement is something to the effect that “I hired a web developer that handled this” – and more rarely “they got the images and told me they were free.”  Just because something is posted on the internet does not make it free.  Just because you had a web developer do it for you does not exonerate you.  Even the free sites, like Pixabay, have license terms.  Some allow unrestricted commercial use, some do not, or require attribution.  If a third party did this, you should review your contract with the developer, and see if they represented that they would create an infringement free website. You might have an indemnification right – in which case you need to make a claim against the developer. If you personally did this, you should see if you can track back to where you copied the image from.  Some sites, particularly social media sites, have very permissive use rights for people on their platform – though often the original image is copied by another user from somewhere else and posted without permission of the owner of the copyright.  You also need to determine if you just linked to the content, or whether you actually copied it and reposted it.  In short, you need to determine if in fact you are responsible for the image or other content that is claimed to be an infringement.  If you copied the image and did not modify it, you need to review the meta data in the image.  Meta data, a portion of which is also referred to as copyright management information or CMI, can be attached to an image to note the author, where to obtain permission, the web site of where the image is available from, and other information. In most cases, it is a violation of US law to modify any CMI in an image.

Step 3 is, if you are a business, to review your insurance policies. In most cases copyright infringement is not within coverage.  However, infringements that are contained in advertising can be, and if you had special insurance, known as media liability1, the policy may cover it. Note that a business is not a formal construct – if you were operating as a sole proprietor and purchased insurance, you should check the policy. You may also have purchased “umbrella” personal coverage that might provide insurance coverage.

Step 4 is to determine  if in fact you are infringing, and if so, whether you have a defense.

In determining if you are infringing and if you might have a defense, some of the factors are:

  • How long ago did this occur?  Was it continuing?  If the initial act occurred more than 3 years ago and the infringement is not a continuing infringement, the statute of limitations may apply and bar the claim.
  • How was the image used – thumbnail? Embedded link (an image tag that references another server), full resolution or lesser resolution?  In some cases some uses of images like thumbnails are less likely to infringe than full resolution copies.
  • Did the image have a copyright notice on it? (please note, such notice could be contained in meta data/CMI and may not be visible)
  • Did you try and remove any CMI?
  • Was the image used in connection with a recent news event, relevant to that event, and associated with reporting on such event?
  • Was the image posted on social media and is that where it came from (some social media sites have broad licenses to re-use those images by other users – at least within those platforms)
  • Did the site generate any revenue of any kind (including 3rd party advertising?)
  • Was the image used in more than one location, in emails, text messages, or posted on other sites?  Each such use might be a separate infringement.
  • If the content is a video and the claim is related to an image in the video (and not the video itself), how long was the image viewable and how prominent was the image?
  • Did the copyright holder provide evidence of registration? A copyright holder in the US cannot sue in court without an actual registration certificate (although they can sue inside of the copyright office, and simultaneously file an application)
  • If evidence was provided, are there any defects in the registration?  Often, the registration is a “group registration” but in fact did not qualify – in which case the registration would be invalid. Group registrations are complex and often authors file them as group registrations but the images are not grouped correctly which can result in a defective registration.
  • Did the copyright holder typically license the image?  How (for example, alone, or solely in a group of other images)?  What was a typical license fee for the image/group?
  • Did you make any effort to try and license the image, investigate etc? Did you get legal advice/clearance?

Some notes about common misperceptions.  The first is that many people immediately think they have a fair use right to use the content. Fair use is a somewhat limited concept in most cases outside of real news reporting.  Every piece of content is not news.  For example, where you ate today and what the food looked like is not news in the typical fair use sense.  If you grab an image that is copyrighted and include it in your foodie blog, that is not normally going to be a fair use just because you think it is news.  However, if the blog is not commercial – in the sense of the blog does not earn you any money – either directly or indirectly, such as from advertising, then that is factor in fair use, though not dispositive.   The second is that many people’s immediate reaction is – well only like 50 people saw the image, or “only my family saw the image” or similar.  Copyright law does not turn on the external number of views.  An infringement occurs if you exercise any exclusive right in the copyright, regardless of whether even one person saw it.  Having said the above, to be sure, fair use is a real legal concept and there are cases in which the unlicensed use of a copyright is permitted under that doctrine.

At this point then, if you have determined there might be an infringement, the question is how to resolve the issue.  Even if you feel like you were making a fair use, just the elimination of risk can have some value.  So then you need to determine – what can a copyright holder recover in damages?

In the US, if the registration was filed within 90 days of publication, or before the infringement occurred, the copyright holder can recover statutory damages and attorneys’ fees.  Those statutory damages range from $750 to $30,000, however, criminal infringement can carry a damage award of $150,000 per infringement.  Having noted that, however “In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.” This is known as an “innocent infringer.” To be an innocent infringer, however, the work needs to have omitted a copyright notice.  If you see a work that has a copyright notice on it (and again, that can be contained in meta data), and you infringe, you cannot be an innocent infringer.

One note about “per infringement” – an infringement is a single exercise of an exclusive right – again, without regard to how many people see the work.  So, for example, the posting of an image on a website is a single act of infringement – whether 1 person or a million saw it.  However, then embedding it in an email . . . is a separate instance of infringement.

Step 5 is now to determine whether to try and resolve the claim yourself, ignore it, or hire a lawyer to resolve it. A few notes on what we have seen:

1. A fair number of letters we see omit a copy of the registration certificate, or any explanation of the claim of infringement.   We would normally never resolve such a claim without seeing the registration certificate and verifying at least to some extent, that the registration is valid.

2. The dollar amount requested is often very bizarre.  For example, $3,568.  How is that determined?  The letters often make no explanation.  In our view, the number should be an even number, most typically based on $200, or $750, unless some evidence of bad faith infringement is shown.

3. The release included or provided if you do pay is often woefully inadequate.  For example, it often is related to a single example.  If a client pays, then it should be released for all uses of any kind in any media through the date of payment. The releases often include other notoriously oppressive language, like arbitration clauses, weird venue clauses in other states, and a variety of other terms that are oppressive and unfair, like future liquidated damages clauses.

While we have helped many of our regular business clients with these issues – it can be tough to help a “one off” personal infringement – as our fees rather quickly approach the amount sought by the copyright troll.

And a final note – if things get very bad and you get sued – HIRE A LAWYER (not us, as we generally restrict our litigation to inside the USPTO).  You may have rights under the AntiSLAPP legislation applicable in many states.  The copyright law generally gives the prevailing party a right to recover their fees – and in some cases in actual court, you can make a special type of offer, and if the plaintiff ultimately wins, but less or equal to your offer, then they have to pay your fees.

First CCPA Fine heralds bad news for many websites

First CCPA Fine heralds bad news for many websites

by | Sep 9, 2022 | Privacy, Privacy Law

The first fine under the California Consumer Privacy Act was issued this week against Sephora U.S.A., Inc. The complaint alleged in part “The right to opt-out is the hallmark of the CCPA. This right requires that companies follow certain straightforward rules: if companies make consumer personal information available to third parties and receive a benefit from the arrangement—such as in the form of ads targeting specific consumers—they are deemed to be “selling” consumer personal information under the law.”

There are three important observations arising from both this allegation, and the consent by Sephora:

  • “Selling” Personal Information does not just mean literally collecting actual personal information and selling it – it means, according to the California attorney general, collection of essentially any information about a web site visitor (for example, what browser they are using) and then providing that to a third party, who then uses that to track such website visitor in their own network of customers – even if the tracking company does not actually know who that person is;
  • Websites that use ANY tracking technology must meet the fairly onerous disclosure notification rules that the site sells personal information – for example Sephora had stated (as most websites do today) that they “do not sell personal information”; and
  • For all practical purposes any website visitor has the right to completely opt out of “tracking” essentially anything, and the site must provide this ability to opt out and respect it.

The other matter of significance from the complaint and resulting consent fine is that if a user instructs their browser to send a do not track signal (also known as a global privacy control, or GPC), the website must honor it.

Finally, Sephora was unable to establish that the analytics providers were “service providers,” which would have resulted in the transaction not being a sale, because they did not have valid service provider agreements with these providers – indeed, the complaint goes to great lengths to note that Sephora exchanged personal information for free or reduced price analytic services.

Under the CCPA, a service provider agreement must:

“(1) Specif[y] that the personal information is sold or disclosed by the business only for limited and specified purposes.

(2) Obligat[e] the third party, service provider, or contractor to comply with applicable obligations under this title and obligate those persons to provide the same level of privacy protection as is required by this title.

(3) Grant[] the business rights to take reasonable and appropriate steps to help ensure that the third party, service provider, or contractor uses the personal information transferred in a manner consistent with the business’ obligations under this title.

(4) Require[] the third party, service provider, or contractor to notify the business if it makes a determination that it can no longer meet its obligations under this title.

(5) Grant[] the business the right, upon notice, including under paragraph (4), to take reasonable and appropriate steps to stop and remediate unauthorized use of personal information.”

CCPA, § 1798.100(d).

Virtually no analytics provider online terms of service meet these requirements.

The whole matter is also strange in that Sephora was given 30 days notice of the violations and for some reason chose not to comply. Did they decide to contest the claims, and then later decided not to? If so, it was a costly decision.

As a result of this decision, all websites using any form of third party (data sharing) analytics providers needs to make sure that they review the agreement with the analytics company carefully to see if they meet the above requirements. If not, they need to either obtain such an agreement, or cease using such provider. They also need to make full disclosure about what data is shared (sold) to the analytics provider, and provide a full opt out notice – and of course, ensure that the site respects GPC, and respects any opt out request. This is going to be very challenging to accomplish for many reasons – in part because in most cases, these analytics providers do not actually know who the person is – they just have all the data that identifies the electronic interaction – so they are going to have to devise a system to scan their identifiers for the requests. In short, this decision is going to make using web analytics all but impossible except where the analytics are limited solely to the website operator.

Oliver & Grimsley, and Mike and Kim, named Best Lawyers in America for 2023

by | Aug 18, 2022 | Firm Matters, In the News

We are extremely excited and honored to announce that Mike Oliver and Kim Grimsley have been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America® for 2023. Best Lawyers is an international lawyer ranking and referring source that is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, and today it has announced its 29th Edition of The Best Lawyers in America® for 2023, which will include Mike Oliver and Kim Grimsley. In order to be featured, lawyers are nominated, critiqued by currently recognized lawyers on the caliber of their work, and analyzed accordingly.
Mike Oliver has been recognized in this publication consecutively since 2006 – he is being recognized in the fields of Copyright Law, Information Technology Law, Trade Secrets Law and Trademark Law. Mike has been practicing corporate, business and intellectual property law for over 30 years. His knowledge as a computer programmer has been a valuable asset for those clients in the software and technology industry.
Kim Grimsley has been recognized in this publication for the past 3 years for her professional excellence by her peers – she is being recognized in the fields of Copyright Law and Trademark Law. Kim has been practicing intellectual property law for over 20 years, and she has enjoyed working with clients – from start-up businesses to publicly traded companies in all industries – in building and protecting their intellectual property in the United States and worldwide.
Everyone at Oliver & Grimsley would like to congratulate Kim and Mike on their continued hard work and excellence.

Copyright Infringement Small Claims Court Services

by | Jun 8, 2022 | Copyrights, Intellectual Property, Litigation

The Copyright Small Claims Court will be commencing operations in a few weeks (late June, 2022), and Oliver & Grimsley is pleased to announce that we will be providing both plaintiff and defense services for copyright small claims actions.

Copyright small claims actions should be a cost effective way of enforcing copyrights in the United States, if the copyright holder is primarily seeking a determination of infringement, and willing to receive an award of no more than $30,000. There are some considerations to keep in mind, however.

One advantage is that Copyright small claims actions can be filed without having previously received a certificate of registration, and without filing an application for special expedited status (which is expensive). However, an application for a certificate of registration must have at least been filed at the time of filing a small claims action.

The ability to file small claims efficiently should also provide a slightly better basis for pre-litigation resolution, as prior to this, it has always been a bit of a poker game to figure out whether an actual full suit would be filed in Federal court. Federal cases are very expensive, and if the copyright was not timely registered (see note 1), no statutory remedies or attorneys fees are available. With the ability to file claims informally, for much less cost, and without significant risk of years of discovery, a defendant receiving a cease and desist letter will have to more carefully consider whether a small claims action might be filed. However, the defendant receiving a small claims complaint can treat that claim as a true case or controversy, opt out of the proceeding, and commence a declaratory judgment action in some remote location, so this risk is not mitigated with the small claims process.

The biggest problem with the small claims process is that the small claims court is not mandatory – it is elective. If a defendant has such a claim filed against it, it can “opt out” of the proceeding, in which case “If you opt out, the CCB will dismiss the claim against you, but the claimant can still bring the same claim in federal court.” See https://ccb.gov/respondent/. Therefore, a plaintiff could go to the trouble of filing the small claim, spending money and filing fees, only to have the defendant opt out, and then the plaintiff has to start all over again in Federal court. It is virtually never cost effective to file a Federal court claim in the $30,000 range, so it will be easy for defendants who determine their risk is only at or around that number, to opt out and thus bet that the plaintiff will not follow through.

On the other hand, if a defendant believes that the claim is higher than $30,000, and there is real risk of plaintiff winning and also collecting fees (see note 1) – then opting in might make sense for the defendant.

In short, there is no one answer whether a plaintiff should file in small claims, and no one right answer whether a defendant should opt out. However, as the process is currently set up, it is generally going to be more likely that a defendant elects to opt out, especially where the plaintiff failed to timely register their copyright, and cannot seek statutory damages and the collection of attorney fees.

Note 1: Under 17 U.S.C. § 412, statutory remedies and attorneys fees are not available to a plaintiff/copyright holder unless the effective date of registration is either within 3 months of first publication of the work, “or 1 month after the copyright owner has learned of the infringement,” https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html#412

Please stop – putting cookie pop-ups on your website

by | Mar 4, 2022 | Privacy, Privacy Law

Almost every major website you visit today pops up a banner to warn you that it uses “cookies.” This is not legally required in the U.S. or in most places, and where it is, the vast majority of sites do not comply with legal requirements. From a policy perspective: cookie pops are just dumb – (virtually) no one reads them. There are vastly better ways to deal with the issue they present – legally and from a site usability perspective.

First, no current U.S. law requires cookie pop-ups. Some sites that are available in the European Union are required to post cookie pop ups – sites that use so called “tracking cookies.” I discuss below a recent EU case that makes this issue even worse than one would have originally thought.

Second, an anecdotal review of websites shows the vast, vast majority of them – all of them in my experience that are “U.S.” sites – utterly fail to comply with the so called EU “cookie law.” Why? Because they store the cookie before consent (which is not permitted under the cookie law) and they simply state, “This site uses cookies” and present an “OK” button (and/or an X to close the pop up) with a link to the privacy policy. See for example www.abajournal.com which, as of the date of this post, simply provides an OK button – no option to do anything like reject or manage the cookies, and a link to the privacy policy. Just a useless and legally insufficient user interface distraction.

Finally, except in very, very limited cases, these cookie pops do not in any way increase user privacy protection. Why? If a site does comply with the notice and consent requirements, it is not legally required to provide the service if a user declines tracking cookies. The site can simply not provide functionality. So in many cases, its not really a choice – the choice is either not to use the site, or consent to tracking. This is made worse because many governments and third parties use these sites for information dissemination. A truly privacy focused law would at least require that the site function if a person elected no tracking.

The whole cookie problem was started by our friends in Europe when they promulgated the ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC. However, no U.S. company really started focusing on compliance with the “cookie issue” presented in the ePrivacy Directive until the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 came into effect. The GDPR applies in Europe, not the US, however so many U.S. companies either do business in, or ostensibly could be regulated by, EU members – so they attempt to comply with both U.S.and EU law.

Many “cookies” – the ones necessary to actually operate a website, are “exempt” and need not be identified nor are they subject to consent. However, sites that use tracking cookies and other tracking technology – even anonymized data – are required under EU law to obtain prior consent before even storing the cookie or other technology that allows such tracking.

In my opinion, this system has been an utter failure in policy and actual impact. It has not stopped companies from incessant user tracking. The companies that rely on user tracking have the power to force the choice of “allow tracking” or do not use the service. The privacy policies remain mostly unintelligible, or at the very least, its is all but impossible to tell what exact tracking a company does, primarily because they either disclose only the types of tracking, or disclose so excessively that the cookie disclosure is indecipherable.

But the EU is doubling down on the concept . . .

In a recent decision (File number: DOS-2019-0137) of the Dispute Chamber of the Data Protection Authority of Belgium issued 2/2/2022, that regulator held that the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s “pop up” framework used by most of its members – intentionally designed to comply with the GDPR, in fact did not. The decision is lengthy (my machine translated version into English is 139 pages long), and undoubtedly will be appealed. As an overview, IAB created a real time bidding system (RTB) – an automated system of bidding for advertising. This is their framework in the U.S. and many other countries, but in Europe, they created the “Transparency and Consent Framework” (TCF). At issue in this case was a subset of the TCF, which the Board described as follows: “Specifically for the TCF, there are also the companies that use so-called “Consent Management Platforms” (CMPs) to offer. Specifically, a CMP takes the form of a pop-up that appears on the first connection to a website appears to request permission from the internet user to collect cookies and other identification data” Para. 40 (Note, all English translations here are machine created by Google’s translation service). The original decision in Dutch is here (and I can post the English translated version if someone requests it): https://www.gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be/publications/beslissing-ten-gronde-nr.-21-2022.pdf.

The basic idea is that IAB manages a “consensu” cookie – that indicates if the web user has already consented (or rejected) cookies. So, a participating site would somehow take information from a user’s initial browser session, send it off to IAB, and IAB would send back a text string indicating if that user had already consented to accept cookies or not. If not, a “cookie pop up” would be presented to the user. The Board found that the IAB maintains a database of users and preferences, which can be used “in order to create an advertising profile of data subjects and to show them personalized advertising” Para. 50. It therefore concluded the IAB was a data controller (a point the IAB disputed). From this point forward the Board essentially found nearly every conceivable violation of the GDPR that could be found. Among them, that “IAB Europe [] failed to observe the principles of due regard for transparency and fairness with regard to data subjects” in part because some of the information that can be sucked up into the preference model includes “special categories of personal data … For example, participating organizations could become acquainted with the websites previously visited by a data subject, including the political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, health data or also trade union memberships of the data subjects be inferred or disclosed.” Para 51. It also found the IAB’s privacy policy insufficient because among other reasons it was only available in English, and used unclear vague terms like “services” and “other means.” Para. 54. It also did not like that the terms “partners” and “third parties” were not explained sufficiently.

To me this is just evidence that no one really understands the law – or that the regulators think it says one thing and the industry thinks it says another. Not good either way. But after that decision, it seems like it would be all but impossible to have a centralized “cookie consent” service – or to comply, the service would be so intrusive as to make the web experience intolerable.

The solution? In my view, just stop with the cookie pop ups. They are stupid and ineffective. Enact a law that requires a service to respect the do not track signal from a browser (currently entirely voluntary), and not store any tracking cookies, clear gifs or other trackers – and require that a site not “discriminate” against users who elect no tracking – basically – provide all functions to users whether they consent or do not consent. I would also prevent any government organization to use a site that tracks users as a service for information dissemination.