We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which I won’t go into here, but as usual our evidence was accepted and the cases were closed.
Two related to catwalk photography at the same show, and they came on two different days. The first one was quite smooth but we received an automated response to the second saying that we were being uncooperative.
I did approach the second differently, although I entered the evidence in the usual spot. In the comments, I asked for Lucire to be whitelisted as we had responded to every notice (a dozen to date?) with our evidence, and it was always accepted. I said I was a bit miffed that I had to take an editor out of her job to look for the evidence. And, as I had not had any success with a site that had pirated some of our work, could they please get back to me with some information so we could become a client?
So they received the evidence—which had been fine for the first item—as well as a lead for a job, and the response was not what I had expected.
Upon prompting them for just how I had been uncooperative, given that the evidence was fine the day before, the case was closed with another automated reply.
I’ve answered every notice in good faith even though it was getting to the point where I wanted them to send me something manually so we would each be wasting similar amounts of time. But what was very weird was they weren’t interested in new business, even when I could direct them to a culprit in an open-and-shut case. In fact, I’ve a small handful they can pursue for us, with multiple photos at issue.
I hope we have been whitelisted though odds are something will happen the very next day to prove me wrong.
I spoke to a top IP lawyer about it and he said his firm’s clients had been receiving similar notices. So these companies are sending out notices far and wide. You almost want to block their bot for popping by but we don’t know its name or IP addresses—nor should we, given that there may be legitimate cases to pursue. If only they wanted the business.
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