lavandeira.net

Imagine that you’re a professional photographer: you earn money by taking photos and licensing them to customers who want to use them. One day while browsing the web you find a web site using one of your commercial photos illegally. You wonder how many people are doing the same, so you run an online search and find out that there are many, many web sites using your photo illegally.

You want these people to stop using your work. You could try and contact each of the web site owners, but you know that it’s going to be pointless because most don’t have contact information, or the contact person doesn’t have access to the web code, or they will just ignore you. You decide to send DMCA takedown notices to the companies hosting each of these web sites, so they will get in touch with their customers and ask them to remove your photo from their web sites.

As a result of the DMCA takedown requests, many of the web sites remove your photo, others offer to license it, as they should have done from the beginning. It seems to be going well.

Until a crazy psychotic person enters the scene.

This crazy person runs several websites. She campaigns for a political candidate in her area, she runs a couple of online shops, and she has a blog or two where she writes about politics and disabled children. All these web sites are now disabled because of your DMCA request: this is not the first time that she illegally uses copyrighted photos, and her hosting provider has disabled her account, together with all the web sites.

Now she is accusing you of being a hacker working for the political candidate opposing the one she’s supporting. She accuses you of hacking and disabling her websites for political reasons. Next thing you know, she’s threatening with suing you for computer crimes.

Let’s summarize what we have so far: someone uses your work illegally, you report it. The hosting provider closes this person’s websites. She accuses you of being a hacker hired by a politician in order to harass her. She makes lots of legal threats.

Sounds like a stupid movie plot, does it?

Well, it really happened a few days ago, and it’s still ongoing. The photographer is Jay Lee (be sure to check his blog, it’s full of awesome photos!), and the crazy person is Candice Schwager.

Candice did just that: she used without permission Jay’s photo as the background picture for her law firm’s website (now offline). Jay then sent a DMCA notification to Candice’s hosting provider (Go Daddy). However, this wasn’t the first time that Go Daddy received a complaint against Candice, and following their terms of use (section 4. iv) they disabled her account, with all the domains in it. Go Daddy’s extreme reaction made Jay feel bad, so he retired his complaint and asked Go Daddy to restore her account. However, by this time Candice was already defaming Jay’s image on the Internet and threatening him via email with suing him for damages. Jay decided to remove the post in his blog, but it was too late: the story had already hit Slashdot and thousands of people were already very interested in her story.

This story is still ongoing. She is now threatening a photography website that reported on her original infringement, and at the same time she’s posting in the same blog she’s threatening, posing as another person, even though her writing style immediately gives her away. Also, several of her websites are inoperative. It is still unknown whether she has disabled them, or she has been a victim of a successful attack. In any case, I’m sure she has learnt not to threaten people online when she’s the one who’s using other people’s work for free.

If you have more information, by all means let me know. I find this story fascinating.