Engel Nyst,
Have we met or spoken before? Your background sounds familiar. Or perhaps I have you confused with another person I have been in contact with.
Either way, I agree with Robert. Thanks for joining the ELI Forums. You have most certainly stirred the pot in a very positive way.
I feel a bit awkward being the one trying to keep up and catch up on all these news, updates, and announcements. As the ELI Forums founder, I am generally accustomed to be the one who announces news and updates! But that obviously has changed in recent months because I feel like I am behind. With the people around here like you, Robert, Greg, etc. it feels like I have to run to keep up around here. It is a great problem to have.
And if it makes you feel better, everything you write and share is Google-indexed and travels much further than you think. Thank you so much for your impressive contributions of late. Feel free to continue putting me behind the eight-ball!
You are doing an enormous service for many people by getting this information out and thank you for being a "copyright nerd". Many of us have become just that by virtue of our prior circumstances.
Another great gift, and I must say it's freshening to see some new blood jumping into the fray...Engel Nyst.
Thanks for the welcome 
. And don't worry, I'm confident that sooner or later a lot of the patterns of behavior uncovered by these forums will have consequences, as they should. In fact, you know they already had some real consequences in changing some of Getty's behavior, in raising awareness in online press, and in helping people affected.
I have not received a letter. I'm a software developer and a copyright nerd. I've given a couple of years of my life to learn the law, the jurisprudence, and the understandings in different communities on the internet.
I know this site for a long while, I'm sure. But I registered only recently, because I wanted to answer a photographer in another topic. Funnily enough, the time for approval and other stuff derailed me, and I haven't yet posted my intended answer. I will soon.
What happened recently was that I was in touch with some photographers (not on this forum), and from discussions it became again clear to me that they get the wrong impressions from the rhetoric of copyright enforcement agents. It's an easy recipe for copyright enforcers: just claim whatever is not blatantly false, but not complete story either, and convince them to give you some rights to enforce; you will have the backing of authors for your covert actions, even though you will hide the actual text of your enforcement letters, phone and stuff, and you will actually make more money than by legitimate licensing or decent enforcement - probably more than they even know. It's a sad state of affairs, and copyright law is just too powerful on the enforcement/remedies side, such that bullying is possible. There's almost no disincentive, almost no consequence (legal) to bullying. So it's not surprising that it finds a rich terrain.
Topic: Photographer sues Getty for extortion letters over her work (Read 25246 times)