geni wrote:
On 03/03/2008, WJhonson(a)aol.com
<WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
Just to address the "lawyers are not
required to send a 'takedown' notice"
By this I assume BC means a "cease and desist". I believe this is de facto
false. While it is true a lawyer could file a suit for anything, any case
being brought, without having made any preliminary action to correct the issue,
would be, imho, thrown out of court.
The first thing a judge looks at is, "have you attempted to correct this out
of court" ? That is did you make any attempt to settle this without wasting
the court's time ?
Unfortunately they can demand money as part of their attempt to settle
out of court. A few hundred dollars is not unusual (see people
moaning about picscout). A few hundred per pics so say about a million
for 2K images. Of course that is rather less than you risk ending up
paying if you take is to court.
This presupposes that stupidity is a herd phenomenon. If the demand for
a settlement is not made in a proper way they can be charged with
extortion. Using your figures, one needs to assume that 2,000 cases
will be launched at virtually the same time. Otherwise, really losing a
small handful of cases would have led to behaviour modification that
would have forestalled the others. Ten cases would strrike me as
already beyond the limits of reality. 10 x $500 = $5,000 at most! We
don't even want to lose that many, but we have to consider the
possibility in the course of analyzing risks. If the costs of managing
the risk are going to be far in excess of the estimated risk, the risk
is easily worth taking.
Ec
Unfortunately the conglomeration of the media is such that it is quite
easy to end up in a situation where you hold over 1000 images
belonging to one company. Thus ten cases could trivially be 5K images.
--
geni