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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

What was illegal about what they were doing?

To add a bit more detail: as far as I understand it (and I am no lawyer) the concept of an Abmahnung is that you notify someone of their (supposed) legal transgression, and give them the option to stop their behaviour and reimburse your costs (lawyer's fees and damages) to avoid going to court. For copyright claims in particular, it may be difficult to claim large damages, but sometimes the right holders collude with their lawyers by demanding the reimbursement of non-existent fees instead, which they then split as profits. This is illegal, as you are only allowed to claim costs that you have actually paid.

A (somewhat dated) example at [1] (german).

[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2009/11/17/abmahnanwalte-ver...

The shared for-profit part of the scheme. It's one thing to hire a lawyer to get a license respected, it's another to institute to what amounts to a fraud scheme: Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible, "hire" a lawyer for free with a profit sharing agreement, then sue who you can. That profit sharing agreement is illegal here, but hard to prove, and the Abmahnindustrie is actively protected by politicians (many of which are lawyers, pure coincidence of course).

Edit: When they send in that notice (die Abmahnung) they will ask for money for incurred costs. Since they did not pay anything in advance - the lawyer worked for free - there were no costs. That's not legal here.

> Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible

What exactly was going on? Have they published images in misleading way?

Or is it case of going after people who published images with "source: Internet"? Or case of attacking people who made honest effort to attribute author?

Because I am familiar with big corporations using freely licensed work and ignoring attribution requirements. For example Facebook is displaying map using OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap license requires a clear attribution, visible to all users ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright ).

Facebook is ignoring that, Facebook employees claimed to be working on improvements, nothing was improved - attribution is still cleverly hidden.

The same with for example Snapchat.

No, wrong target - big enterprises have lawyers of their own. The target goal here is the 13 year old that published a fan page on neocities. He won't defend himself, the parents will pay, and that the claimed image licensing costs are way higher than what usually can be claimed in such a situation they will not notice.

If there are sources confirming targeting such cases as "13 year old that published a fan page on neocities" then I can become outraged.

But for all what I know they could be targeting marketing departments using stolen photos in ads.

“If there are sources” — the answer is different depending on whether you speak German or not. The practices of the so-called “Abmahnindustrie” (legal warning industry?) are well publicized in German media and widely known in the German tech sector. It might be hard to find an authoritative source in English.

As far as I understand, they don’t get that much more damages from larger cases, so they target masses of small fish instead. Individual ebay sellers, small private clubs (which are ingrained in the German culture) and the like.

The typical target is small business, nonprofits, schools, etc.

But large business/enterprise screws up with image licensing too, and ends up just paying as well.

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