One of the reasons Keith Adams sold AROnline, a site that he put decades into, was someone alleging he had infringed copyright over a photograph. So he paid up. But for long-term survival, he turned to the team at Great British Car Journey, who had deeper pockets, as AROnline was in danger of closing down.
I’m not privy to which photo it was, or the complainant, but I also know of seriously questionable players in the copyright trolling space. Copytrack I’ve blogged about here—pursing on behalf of a supposed copyright owner who was never a party to the licensing agreement in the first place. A few years back, a similar American service advanced such weak legal arguments in their dealings with me—probably because I never told them I have a law degree specializing in this area, and I was replying from our company’s main account, without my usual sig. file—that I knew it must have been a con job.
We live in an era of phony scams and people with the cojones to try it on, since there are politicians out there doing the very same, yet the mainstream media normalize them.
Sadly for any car enthusiast or historian, Classic Car Catalogue has shut down after legal threats over copyright infringement. A non-profit project that had been around for nearly three decades forced to shut down, possibly because of similar phony threats.
I contacted the owner of the site to ask but so far I haven’t heard back. Their words on the home page:
Sadly, this non-profit project, which has been driven by passion for almost 30 years, has now been forced to close after being sued for copyright infringement.
We are living in a world where passion and altruism have become a crime, whilst savagery and greed are fully supported by the law.
While it’s true that they scanned some items from magazines, the material dated from 1930 to 1979. Some would indeed have been covered by copyright. But the standard procedure would have been contacting the site owner, and failing that, proceed to DMCA notices. Proceeding to something greater—and that’s the sense I get—violates any sense of decency, especially as they have been open about removing any materials that are the subject of any concerns.
Most of the time I’ve turned a blind eye to the odd thing scanned out of Lucire if there was some historical purpose, the sort of thing that law and precedent would regard as fair dealing under our laws here, not dissimilar to fair use in other jurisdictions.
And Classic Car Catalogue’s purposes would, in my view, fall within that realm.
The photos were incredibly low-res, not sharp enough to trouble anyone, and the site was a wonderful resource to double-check some of the information we have on Autocade.
From what I could tell, a great deal of the images were press ones, which Classic Car Catalogue would have a legitimate reason to run without any fear.
If what I have encountered through gaslighting copyright trolls happened with Classic Car Catalogue, then I fear basic human knowledge is being wiped out for the sake of avarice. The hobbyists won’t be able to afford to publish online, concentrating that power in the hands of the few. Those who built up their sites and got big are pulling the ladder up.
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