Anti-Infringement Company Caught Infringing On Its Website 135
danomac writes "Canipre, a Canadian anti-infringement enforcement company, has been using photos on their official website without permission. This company hopes to bring U.S.-style copyright lawsuits to Canada, and they are the company behind Voltage's current lawsuits. It says right on their website, 'they all know it's wrong, and they're still doing it' overlaid on top of the image used without permission. Multiple photos from different photographers are used; none of them with permission. Canipre's response? 'We used a third party vendor to develop the website and they purchased images off of an image bank,' they said, trying to pass the blame to someone else. Some of the photos were released under the Creative Commons, meaning they could have used the photos legally if they'd provided proper attribution."
Re:$5k limit (Score:3, Informative)
Look at this way. If you get a letter from anyone threatening legal action and demanding some sort of a payment to avoid it, you are a fool not to seek legal council. Whether this is a copyright troll, or a mean-spirited neighbor, even if you can't afford a lawyer, you can't afford not to retain one.
On shifting the blame (Score:4, Informative)
So really, their best course of action is to simply identify the third party that they obtained the infringing content from, because at least then the regular penalty for infringement would be applied to the third party and they themselves could then at least argue that they did not previously realize they were infringing (they would still lose license to use the works, however, since they would still be infringing, and if they continued to try to use them, they would be guilty of knowingly possessing infringing content).
Website is not even compliant with provincial laws (Score:2, Informative)