Yesterday, I was contacted by an agency about the alleged use of an image without a license. Putting aside the accusation for the moment, and the eye-watering settlement figure that is being requested (I am an individual blogger who operates this blog at a loss, without any real way to pay what’s being requested), I wanted to discuss my thought process since then.
My initial thoughts as of last night were to shut the blog down and walk away. Whilst I do not accept liability, the idea that there might have been other, similar images over a 10-year span that would trigger similar accusations just didn’t seem worth it to me.
I’ve also made clear, shortly before the infringement accusation came in, that I’m not doing great at the moment, on a few different fronts.
Spending some time with friends last night helped a lot. I spoke to some of them early in the evening and then spent the rest of the night talking about everything but this issue. It helped. A lot
I got up this morning and set to work. I have gone through 2081 posts and deleted images if I didn’t know, for sure, where they came from. There actually were not many, given the number of posts and the decade-long timescale. I don’t believe that any infringement has taken place, but it’s reassuring to remove the risk that others see things differently.
So, there may be a fair few random posts that are suddenly lacking images or look a bit different. It’s something to be careful of going forward, too.
This is news. People can just claim shit from you? what is this youtube????
This is horrible news and I’m so sorry to hear it. I try to credit any images that I think belong to someone else or even that they worked on themselves, but it is really scary that someone would do this to you. It is not hard to envision this happening to any of us and that is very sobering.