Um, Sorry, But You Don't Get To Sue When Somebody Moves Images You're Hotlinking

from the so-many-stupid-people dept

While courts around the world have come to different conclusions on the legality of hotlinking -- placing an inline link in a web page to an image hosted on a different web server -- it's a practice that's generally regarded as bad internet manners. The cases have generally focused on the sites displaying other people's images, but this point was apparently lost on one bright spark, who threatened the host of a site whose images he was hotlinking with a lawsuit (via Kottke.org) after the host took the original site down and deleted the images. Again, while courts differ on their views about hotlinking, it's pretty unlikely that any court would agree that the person doing the hotlinking has a right to the continued use of the images. This guy felt otherwise, at least until he actually spoke to his lawyer about it, who apparently clued him in. In some way, it's sort of disappointing that the guy's lawyer didn't want to move forward, since the suit would been pretty amusing.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Once Again: Do Not Send Legal Threats To Companies Because You Don't Like What A User Says

from the both-according-to-the-law-and-common-sense dept

It's getting to be rather silly how many times we've posted about section 230 of the CDA, which protects websites from the actions of their users -- but it seems that there's no shortage of folks with quick legal trigger fingers, who figure that anything they dislike online must be illegal, and they can blame the site that hosted it. The latest example, sent in by an anonymous reader, is that 800Notes, one of many websites that allows users to post notes on random callers (telemarketers and such) discovered that the owner of one company, mynutritionstore, whose phone number was listed on the site sent an angry threat demanding it be taken down, because someone had a negative experience with the company. When 800Notes told the owner of mynutritionstore that it would not remove the negative reviews, he apparently threatened to sue 800Notes. Public Citizen stepped in and sent him a quick legal lesson on the safe harbors provided by the CDA, how anti-SLAPP laws work and also pointed out that his claim that the posts were defamatory is clearly shown to be untrue by the fact that the same demand for a takedown claims that the content is proprietary to mynutrtionstore. If it's proprietary than that would indicate that it's truthful, not defamatory. It's not libel if it's the truth.

So, once again, just because you dislike what someone has to say about you online, it doesn't mean that it's illegal. Also, threatening to sue the service provider for content you dislike generated by users is bound to backfire -- often badly. Hopefully, more people will learn this, and we'll stop seeing these sorts of threats.

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Before You Threaten To Sue Someone Over Their Website, You Might Want To Understand The Web

from the a-little-suggestion dept

We get to see ridiculous legal threats all the time. Sometimes we get such legal threats directly (my favorite was the big name analyst firm that once threatened to sue us because we linked to their own press release), but more often we hear about the ridiculous legal threats made to others. However, in all the bizarre and ridiculous legal threats, it would appear that Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch may have just won the award for both the most ridiculous and the most persistently wrong threatener. Arrington shares on his site how he received an email demanding $150,000 for a photo of the actor Ashton Kutcher that TechCrunch was using "to generate traffic and revenue." The guy sending the email claimed to represent the interests of the photographer of the photograph -- and said that if Arrington didn't pay up quickly (and quietly), he would file a suit for $1.5 million. It's hard to start on what's wrong with the lawsuit, but the obvious place is the simple fact that TechCrunch never hosted the picture in question. Instead, someone in the comments once linked to a website that hosted the picture, and if you did a search in Google for Kutcher's name, the photo showed up connected to TechCrunch because of that link.

Even ignoring the ridiculous amount being asked for and the clear confusion over how Google and the web work, what's even more bizarre about this is that when this was pointed out to the guy, rather than understanding what happened, he just became even more defensive. He somehow thought that it was TechCrunch's responsibility to get the photo taken off Google. He then started calling TechCrunch's advertisers and threatening them saying that they would be a part of the lawsuit that he was intending to file. Arrington wrote up a detailed explanation of this... and then the guy started posting a series of poorly spelled comments trying to defend his position -- insisting that the photographer was "robed" and that it was clear TechCrunch had something to do with it. Congratulations, Mike, you've won the award for the most bizarre and persistently ridiculous legal threat we've seen. And that's saying a lot.

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