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Comment by bomb199 | Hacker News Reader

Should be illegal.

I'm sure countless people pay these kinds of fines, just assuming that the company threatening to sue them is legitimate.

What's to stop me from just making a cool company name and sending cease and desist letters asking for fines for all kinds of "IP"?

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The company issuing the threat had identified what they thought was a copied bit of artwork. This isn't a company just randomly attacking anyone - they honestly thought (via automated system) that one of their images had been partially copied.

>they honestly thought (via automated system)

that sounds like passing the blame to someone else ("automated system")

I was responding to a claim that it was entirely spurious. It did show signs of being a copy of a portion of the image. It turned out that that portion was a copy of another image, which they (or their system) didn't realise. But none of this is (as the top post in this thread claims) just invented. Had 2600 copied that portion of that image, court action against them may well have succeeded.

All of this could easily have happened without an automated system involved.

If it wasn't an automated system, they would have the cost of someone going through everything.

Do you really doubt that this is constantly happening and people are paying? Just look at the people who get DMCA'd for content they made themselves. Same system, just instead of paying a fee they lose their youtube/Twitch.

I agree with you that people are unfairly impacted by such practices; the whole thing even discourages some people from producing things.

Again, I was arguing against the claim it was without merit. A large team of people could have made the same mistake.

This was spurious entirely. They claimed ownership of an asset that wasn't theirs based on a composite asset they didn't own. They literally did no checking on whether or not they owned the original resource. The fact of the matter is this was an automated shakedown in one of the most corrupt industries in America. Automated copyright and patent abuse claims are literally sucking money out of the productive engine of the country and the whole industry needs to be sued out of existence and people who do it need to end up in jail for long sentences as a warning to other jerks that might try it.

No, the trunk archive image was owned by them and appeared to them to be the source of the ink blots. This is covered in the article. They didn't claim ownership of anything else. They asked for licensing fees for the use of what they thought was their image.

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