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They're not saying they're the bad guys

“shady”

They seem to be claiming the image in this case got bumped up to the highest price tier only because there was a C&D notice.

Exactly - the price of that particular image switched to a higher tier just because they found a copyright infringement. This is the shady part. Back then I recall reading other threads about people in very similar situations. Unfortunately I'm not able to find those threads anymore, but I've found a Reddit post mentioning that Getty stopped with these shady practices when their CEO changed.

Edit: found something similar to what I mean [1], [2]

[1]: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/625-De...

[2]: https://ryanhealy.com/getty-images-extortion-letter/

You could think of it as, it was bumped up to a higher tier because there is evidence that out of all their millions of stock photos, someone chose this one.

That would make sense if this was done _after_ they estimate the infringement price that they present in the C&D - which AFAIK wasn't the case

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