George Riddick — the One-Man RIAA of Clip Art 175
An anonymous reader writes "Pages at ireport.com and extortionletterinfo.com have been documenting and researching the activities of George P. Riddick III, previously known for his lawsuits against IMSI and Xoom at the turn of the century. In 2007 he issued a largely-ignored press release claiming the majority of clip art online infringes a copyright and has ranted about how Microsoft and Google are stealing from him. In recent months, he's apparently made a business model of going after web site operators who were using clip art they believed to be legally licensed or public domain, telling them they're infringing clip art collections he hasn't offered commercially in years and making outrageous settlement demands. He seems to have tested the waters on this some years back, but emboldened by the passage of the PRO-IP act, he's gone aggro with it. A few dodgy anonyblogs had popped up to 'out' him as a copyright abuser, but these recent ireport.com and extortionletterinfo.com reports go much deeper in documenting and researching Riddick's recent one-man campaign to be the RIAA of clip art."
Growing network of victims! (Score:5, Informative)
Use the web (Score:5, Informative)
Although the web makes this sort of thing possible, the same web will help to mitigate the damage. I'm very happy people post this thing for all to see.
After reading all of these letters, I don't think that anybody would really take this guy seriously. He is running the equivalent of a modified 419 scam (pay us a little to prevent a big payout in the future.) The repeated requests for confidentiality should be a tipoff.
Hopefully not too many small websites without proper legal counsel to advise them on this sort of thing have not been taken....
Even stupider... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:let me be the first to say... (Score:1, Informative)
What a douche bag. Our economy is falling apart, our courts should be handling more sinister crimes like rape/murder and this guy is off law suiting away
Just so you know, the courts are different for copyright vs. criminal acts.
What a joke. (Score:5, Informative)
The letters at extortionletter.info are hilarious. As Walter would say, "Fucking amateur! George Riddick you're out of your element."
One of my fav lines:
"I would be happy to send you a rough draft copy of our standard Settlement and Release Agreement, which we have used over 100 times over the past few years (unfortunately)."
Is it really a "rough draft" if you are using it?
Or how about:
We are very disappointed that you have chosen litigation for you, your family, your business partners, your distributors (i.e. XXXXXXXXX), and your end user customers. The amount of money spent bringing all of these people and companies to court is going to be enormous. But since our designs are all registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, you will end up paying every dime of these legal expenses on all sides, in addition to all infringement and DMCA (Section 1202) penalties as well. These penalties could easily exceed $35,000 per design infringed. What a shame!
What a shame? What a dick! and what's an "end user customer?" Isn't an end user a customer? I love the fact in his letters he always "hopes to keep this confidential." That always works when the internet is involved.
fucking lamer.
Re:Use the web (Score:4, Informative)
Although the web makes this sort of thing possible, the same web will help to mitigate the damage.
Riddick's thought of that. He's a domain squatter too:
http://www.islandview2.com/index3A.htm [islandview2.com]
Usually, when someone takes advantage of one facet of the World Wide Web [what-is-what.com], they take advantage of all of it.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Informative)
Imageline, Inc registered copyrights on clipart in 1996. The copyright office's search page does not display the actual subject matter of the copyright registrations, so it is hard to tell if the claimed images were in that collection.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Informative)
I realize there's a required minimum number of posts before becoming real - for the moment, I can only aspire to be real with post #2 here.
I just wanted to stick my nose into the conversation to vouch for the effort that I know firsthand George put in to creating the image libraries that he sells in various forms.
From reading tfa & links, I got the impression that the individual embroidery sites were doing the right thing and pointing back to the vendor(s) where they purchased the artwork. To me, they're off the hook at that point. I wasn't always wild about the licensing agreements that were used with the clipart libraries & I don't support blanket scare tactics to weasel money from mom-n-pop embroidery shops, but I do think whoever is collecting the money for use of the clipart libraries ought to hand some portion of it over George.
Re:And they called it (Score:1, Informative)
Laughs, I just found a court case that dismissed his rights to some of the images already: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=docket&no=021121p
Sadly, it's this type of sue everyone for everything attitude that places the US in a bad light.
Re:George Riddick - the one man RIIA of clipart (Score:4, Informative)
Wow! My Google "clip art alert" system really does work!
Checking my e-mails at lunch today, I noticed this Slashdot article devoted entirely to me and my small electronic graphic arts content development company, Imageline. We are honored.
First of all, I would like to say "thank you" to those of you who chose not to simply jump on the "sensational" bandwagon, but took the time to carefully read what we are saying and understand what we are trying to do here at Imageline. We believe that our efforts, our experience, our creativity, and our tenacity, will benefit practically everyone who wants to participate in the wonders of the digital art world and the Internet legally.
And "hello, Jim!" ... it was great to hear you are still 'active and kicking' after all of these years. I always admired the fact that you were not reluctant at all to speak your mind. That's what successful companies are made up of ... excellent, dedicated, and intelligent people ... with a great work ethic and a common cause.
There's a huge difference between what we trying to do here at Imageline and what the RIAA has been doing for the past few years. I do not believe that the appropriate way to curtail digital piracy over the Internet is to simply try to throw a few college students, uninformed end-users, and/on single moms into bankruptcy ... or into jail.
At Imageline, we ALWAYS go after the "middlemen", exclusively. They are the most flagrant infringers, by far. Not the actual end-users, who, by and large, are the innocent recipients of stolen property, and the victims of the various distribution scams organized and orchestrated by these so-called legitimate "middlemen". The industry calls them "digital pirates".
The "middlemen" I am referring to here are the dealers, the distributors, the "pushers", the web site operators, and the product bundlers (even the counterfeiters), who try to feather their own nests by sub-licensing and re-distributing the hard-earned digital artwork and other property owned by others. From my own personal experience, most of these "middlemen" not only do not respect copyrights or the laws of this country, they do not respect property rights in general, unless, of course, that property is theirs or something they have stolen. It is all very shameful, in my opinion.
Those that have made an honest mistake (and we all do that on occasion) are ALWAYS treated with respect and given several reasonable options by Imageline in an attempt to resolve our disputes and protect their end user customers at the same time. In fact, some of our best friends, and best customers, are people who inadvertently were caught infringing at some time in the past, but certainly do not do that sort of thing anymore. By and large, they are happy people, as well, and have no trouble looking at themselves in the mirror each day.
Every single company we have contacted over the past few years is a "middleman" trying to earn money from goods and services (and sweat and tears) of others, to which they have no rights.
Most of the people responding to this web posting apparently have not even bothered to take the time to read our various communications carefully. Yet they are not hesitant at all to criticize what we are doing. That is a very dangerous, and not particularly useful, way to interact, in my humble opinion.
Imageline owns one of the largest archives of digital vector-based artwork in the entire world, and we have just recently doubled our exclusive libraries with the acquisition of the Image Club Graphics libraries from Getty Images. All of our artwork had previously been developed in-house by talented artists, designers, animators, and digitizers, and by a number of what I consider "world class" independent illustrators under tight "work-for-hire" agreements. The new Image Club libraries begin an entire new chapter for Imageline, and we are all very excited about our future.
Unlike most of our competi