I poured the hot water into my mug, watching the tea bag inflate and faintly color the water. It was a cold mid-February morning, with hoar frost clinging to the tree branches draped low across the back yard.
I shivered, glad to be inside the warm house, wrapping my hands around the warm mug, looking across the yard. Amidst the sparkling crisp glory of the winter’s morn, I saw my neighbor’s dog squat down and leave a steaming pile on my side of the property line.
I thought of Geoff Beale.
Beale works for PicRights. They call themselves many things—protectors of intellectual property, copyright managers—but they are copyright trolls.
Big Tech censors you under the guise of "misinformation." Cancel culture censors you by getting you to self-censor under threat of losing your job and platform. And copyright trolls censor you, denying the existence of genuine fair use.
Let's talk about the latter.
Fair use exists. It does. You can use copyrighted imagery in certain situations (i.e. you're actually talking about the image, you don't make money off of it, etc.). But our copyright law, created before the digital age, doesn't hold up well in the internet age and there are large loopholes where copyright trolls can, using threats, slip through.
There have been times people have used my content or images.
Sometimes I let it slide, sometimes I ask that they give me credit and link back to my site, sometimes I ask them to take it down. Most infamously, one woman tried to copy entire sections of my writing for her book about the Dakota Access pipeline protest. I repeatedly asked her to stop (i.e. cease and desist), and while I ultimately reported it to her publisher (Amazon) to get the book shut down because she refused to admit she used my writing without permission, I didn’t look at it as a chance to make bank off of her. Before her, I never had to get aggressive with someone who’s used my work; most people will quickly comply and are decent about it.
Copyright trolls function differently.
They don't send out cease and desist requests. They go directly for "we're going to get $X out of you, and if you don't pay quickly, we'll charge you more AND send it to our junkyard dog lawyers to really cook you good."
I know, because it happened to me.
Copyright Trolling 101: Final Test
Answer as best you can.
1. Copyright trolls look for offenders who are:
a) People who, by sharing a link to an online news article, unwittingly caused the automated RSS feed generation to grab a photo from that news article and stick it somewhere on their site.
b) Non-profit organizations.
c) Unimportant bloggers from places like North Dakota who charged no money to read their blog nor did they run ads (prior blog was on Blogger; it was all free).
d) People who think they used public domain imagery, and even people who purchased a stock image but didn't understand the fine print that limited what it could be used for, or for how long they could use it before taking it down.
e) Small business owners who hire someone to make them a website and don’t realize there are copyrighted images used that they are now held responsible for.
f) People posting images in order to talk about what’s going on in the image as a matter of news, discourse, or theory.
g) People grabbing screenshots of image mash-ups from social media to talk about what people are saying on social media.
h) All of the above, and probably more.
2. Copyright trolls use a business model that:
a) Uses fear of expensive legal harassment to get payment.
b) Knows what hiring a lawyer would cost and price their demands around that same price point.
c) Are like a dog, taking a dump on your lawn.
How It All Went Down
I’ve made it a point to specifically use my own photos or art on my blogs and website in recent years because I know these fetid swamp bacteria exist. But in September 2021, I was targeted by Beale and PicRights for two images on my old blog; one was a screenshot of a thread on Twitter in which someone had posted several images along with their comment on the images, and the other was a photo from January 6 in which I talked about the photo itself. In the Twitter screenshot, only one of the four montage images the person on Twitter had shared was targeted by PicRights.
I have a friend who is a copyright and patent attorney; he was the first person I contacted the morning I woke up to two threatening emails demanding around a thousand dollars for those images.
We discussed the images, and the usage of them. He agreed it could be argued as fair use. “The problem is that what it would cost to hire a lawyer and deal with this is about what they’re asking from you,” he said.
They knew what they were doing.
“I’d respond back and offer to pay less,” he recommended, giving me a figure that he thought was more reasonable for me, and probably would be accepted by PicRights.
This was less about protecting copyrights (cease and desist do that), but more about getting money. It’s their business model; they’ll take maximum money for minimum effort, so lowballing them was a viable option.
I’d done some research online, and you can do the same by looking up “picrights copyright trolls” or “picrights copyright higbee and associates” in your search engine of choice. Get yourself a cup of tea and take a load off while you read the stories on the internet, because they’re everywhere, in forums like reddit, on Quora, and the focus of full-on warning articles.
What it is, is a shakedown.
They seem to use software that scrapes the internet, and then they blast a scripted email out to every “offender” that’s highly threatening. There are mixed responses to that email. Some people have ignored it and been fine, some have pushed back demanding proof of formal registration, while others have ended up the target of the California law firm Higbee & Associates (read the webpage at that link, and the comments section; it’s eye-opening). There are legitimate copyright attorneys who are providing advice for people because this has become such a scourge.
I emailed Cockroach Beale and offered him my lowball offer.
They accepted, but had to wrap it in language that made them seem like the noble protectors of great art and artists everywhere.
Blah blah blah.
“Upon payment as indicated in this email, are the issues discussed in this email considered permanently resolved between the parties involved? I would like this in writing via an email response for my records prior to making any payment,” I wrote back to Beale.
No response.
I went ahead and called Beale directly, there in his office in Toronto, Canada, an office I hope, at some point, had a few trucks parked outside of it honking for freedom this past winter, honking loud enough for Beale to weep, and demanded he confirm that payment ended the matter.
I recorded my call with Beale, because you don’t trust parasites. You only verify they’re gone.
Copyright trolls, using bot systems to scrape the web, making their money off of middle-class people—low-level bloggers, artists creating mashups, small-businesses, denying fair use—the kind of people who don’t have lawyers on retainer, people who probably were within fair use in many cases, but can't afford to prove it. They just have to pay the fee because they can't afford legal representation.
These are the kind of people making the internet an awful place.
Nevertheless, I decided to take the difference between what PicRights asked for, and what I actually paid, and donate that money to a good cause. I gave it to a ministry that puts Bible study material in prisons.
Prison seems a fitting association for PicRights.
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