There's a company out there, that I'm not even going to name, that scans the Internet looking for images that their clients claim a copyright on. When they find them, they send messages to the site owner and demand money from them. This is technically legal, even though it borders on extortion and harassment. A lot of people pay the money.
I'm not one of those people though. I got two such messages today, regarding forum posts. As any idiot with a web site knows, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for all of its flaws, has a safe harbor provision for site operators that host user-generated content. So I essentially told them to go fuck themselves and read the law, in which case they indicated that the messages were automated, sorry, our bad.
They're a known copyright troll, and they do sometimes bend legal ethics and send lawyers after people. That would be a real waste of time for my LLC, because it doesn't have any money, even if the law was on their side.
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