On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 10:26 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/03/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@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.
Under the DMCA, the WMF is plausibly a service provider, as we don't create the content, and as such our liability for damages prior to notification is zero.
An attorney could ask us for anything: "Take down this and that images which are owned by my client. And we want a Pony."
They aren't legally entitled to the Pony, no matter how nicely they ask for it.
For the WMF, damages would start after a legally compliant takedown or equivalent was received; given that, in any case with an apparently legal takedown notice we take it down, the damages are going to be nil.