Slashdot Mirror
George Riddick — the One-Man RIAA of Clip Art
An anonymous reader writes "Pages at ireport.com and extortionletterinfo.com have been documenting and researching the activities of George P. Riddick III, previously known for his lawsuits against IMSI and Xoom at the turn of the century. In 2007 he issued a largely-ignored press release claiming the majority of clip art online infringes a copyright and has ranted about how Microsoft and Google are stealing from him. In recent months, he's apparently made a business model of going after web site operators who were using clip art they believed to be legally licensed or public domain, telling them they're infringing clip art collections he hasn't offered commercially in years and making outrageous settlement demands. He seems to have tested the waters on this some years back, but emboldened by the passage of the PRO-IP act, he's gone aggro with it. A few dodgy anonyblogs had popped up to 'out' him as a copyright abuser, but these recent ireport.com and extortionletterinfo.com reports go much deeper in documenting and researching Riddick's recent one-man campaign to be the RIAA of clip art."
I'll make millions!
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
"Pages at ireport.com and extortionletterinfo.com have been documenting and researching the activities of George P. Riddick III
they call the document "the chronicles of riddick"
*bad-dum-dah*
I'll be here all week
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Time to sicc Toombs on his rump.
No jail that serves waffle-eating pussies will be for him.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
A very large and rapidly growing network of Riddick victims are organizing and sharing information. A large compilation of his threats and extortion tactics, which he tries to keep secret, are being assembled. You can find some here.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Although the web makes this sort of thing possible, the same web will help to mitigate the damage. I'm very happy people post this thing for all to see.
After reading all of these letters, I don't think that anybody would really take this guy seriously. He is running the equivalent of a modified 419 scam (pay us a little to prevent a big payout in the future.) The repeated requests for confidentiality should be a tipoff.
Hopefully not too many small websites without proper legal counsel to advise them on this sort of thing have not been taken....
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Let's call it The chronic LES (Lawsuit Egocentric Syndrome) of Riddick
Never did trust him.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
make no mistake, this is an assault on "fair use" of work.
The logos and art in question are not representing Google or Microsoft, they are mere representations of what was found on the external sites which are assumed to be displaying lawfully acquired content.
Google and Microsoft are not the police or the courts. If you have a valid issue with their display of an image, issue a take down notice.
In the UK, it is highly advisable for any business to take out Professional Indemnity Insurance. This covers this type of eventuality - and faced with a professional legal opponent these type of people will invariably back down.
Riddick's designs are so simple and generic that they could easily have been drawn (or typed) by someone else from scratch without ever having seen Riddick's version.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Is there any way he could take credit for Clippy the dancing paperclip? I think most of us would enjoy it if he was made illegal to install on new computers.
What a douche bag. Our economy is falling apart, our courts should be handling more sinister crimes like rape/murder and this guy is off law suiting away (yes, I know the courts are different for copywrite vs. criminal acts- thank you for pointing that out wannabelawyers on slashdot) on some "oh i'm the victim, the internet is against me" crusade.
If this guy really owned the clipart, and they are being used commercially without permission, then he has every right to go after any involved party. Obviously they can then choose to settle, if under reasonable terms, or just remove the damn clipart.
I really don't see what's so evil about this guy. *As long as he can prove his assertions.*
[ Notice how slashdot folks rail against people who steal personal videos, photos, artwork, etc. for commercial use... ]
The letters at extortionletter.info are hilarious. As Walter would say, "Fucking amateur! George Riddick you're out of your element."
One of my fav lines:
"I would be happy to send you a rough draft copy of our standard Settlement and Release Agreement, which we have used over 100 times over the past few years (unfortunately)."
Is it really a "rough draft" if you are using it?
Or how about:
We are very disappointed that you have chosen litigation for you, your family, your business partners, your distributors (i.e. XXXXXXXXX), and your end user customers. The amount of money spent bringing all of these people and companies to court is going to be enormous. But since our designs are all registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, you will end up paying every dime of these legal expenses on all sides, in addition to all infringement and DMCA (Section 1202) penalties as well. These penalties could easily exceed $35,000 per design infringed. What a shame!
What a shame? What a dick! and what's an "end user customer?" Isn't an end user a customer? I love the fact in his letters he always "hopes to keep this confidential." That always works when the internet is involved.
fucking lamer.
-Insert Chronicles of Riddick Clipart Here-
"I drank what?" -Socrates
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
That's simply riddickulous!
Because his family clearly lacs the fantasy to find an original name for their kids it wouldn't surprise me they've also failed to pay the dues on this now illegal name.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Part of me wishes I were in a position to be contacted by Mr Riddick, there are a couple of things I would want to ask him namely if browsing the internet and making bullyboy threats is a good business model and secondly if he has ever actually sued anyone successfully.
Having been through various sites since reading this entry I see sort of a pattern, a cohort of his emails the victim and sets herself up as a friendly warning, Mr Riddick comes along and makes threats to which our new friend suggest we pay up to, it's obviously a scam and you'll notice every dated email from the past 14 months mention how he has just got a new legal team etc etc.
I feel sorry for the people who take him seriously.
claiming the majority of clip art online infringes a copyright
I'm actually fairly willing to believe this.
Of course, that's not the same as proving that HIS clip-art is being used at all the sites he sues. If it is, then I'd find it hard to actually get mad at him.
Did anyone read the linked to "rant"? It's actually fairly cogent. First he basically says "If I was to steal your copyrighted stuff, you'd sue me into the ground because you're a huge company. Yet you steal mine all the time. That's rather unfair." Doesn't this sound like the Official Slashdot Position? Next he goes on to say he's mad at Google and Microsoft's image search tools because they continue to cache the image even after the site has removed it. Microsoft claimed they weren't caching them and he showed them an example that proved them wrong. Isn't this also a very Slashdot thing to do?
All in all, it sounds like he wasn't pissed that the image search features exist, but that they kept caching them even when he got people to yank his clipart off their server. Then they get money for ads on pages with the cached picture. And then people would copy the clipart again from the returned image results, making it easier for people to continue copying his clipart.
I've went to the links in the summary and they actually make me sympathize with the guy MORE. And I'm a bittorrenting fiend. One of them posts a picture of him accompanied by "Maybe if he makes enough money, he can go on a diet course, or at least buy a bigger belt to hold up that fat, obese stomach." Especially petty considering he looks like just about any old man his age, not actually spectacularly obese or anything.
I haven't been able to find widespread claims that he sues over clipart he doesn't own the copyrights to. Just that he's a jerk because his letters say "you put our clipart on your page, pay up" and don't give the target a chance to say "I'm sorry, I'll just take it off and we can pretend it never happened." The only other thing I can find other than personal insults was that they claim his clipart sucks anyway (sour grapes, anyone?). True, he does sell a lot of clipart that looks straight from the 80s, but there's also things like this:
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/ipics2_LOGOSNature.htm
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/ipics2_OTHERWorldRel2.htm
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/PRESENT_Index.htm
This looks like prime fodder for a lot of business use today. It looks better than 90% of what I see in powerpoint presentations even now.
And the last point I can find people make against him is that he has clipart of the UN flag and the Sydney Opera House and those have some very specific copyrights attached to them. First, the UN flag is not protected by copyright but simply by a UN resolution that says "don't use our flag." A resolution that has no actual legal backing. And the question of how much the SOH can legally limit the use of their image is murky at best:
http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/freedom_to_differ/2007/06/photographing_t.html
So really, I just don't get the uproar. Yeah, I wish copyright law was MUCH different to align penalties with actual profit being made by the infringer. But this guy hardly seems to be in the same league as the RIAA and their whole "making available" bullshit.
And here again we see the Entitlement Mentality. The "starving artist" can't earn a living at his chosen profession. Exactly why is the artist *entitled* to make a living at said profession? If his chosen career path isn't economically viable, why am I suddenly obligated to support him? Perhaps the "starving artist" wouldn't be starving if he made better choices in his life.
Further, I work in an industry that relies heavily on copyright law. It is plainly obvious that copyright law is broken, and is detrimental to society in it's current form. The "temporary monopoly" was never intended to grant a semi-permanent revenue stream for you and your children. Copyright Rebels, my ass.
Please mod this up if read the second article the letter fits the definition of a scam. Nigerian scam was just a catchy heading
Shall we tag chronicles_of_riddick? Please?
Except for the less polished langauge, it's the same thing that happens if you happen to grab an image off a CD from ten years ago which unluckily happens to be in the Getty imagebank and use it in your website. They'll send you a bill for a couple grand for an image they license at $30/yr. And you'll send a check, because if not they'll haul you to court, and any lawyer worth his salt will tell you you're fucked.
The problem is that there is no way to determine if the clip art (or images) you have infringe on anyone's copyright, because there is no way for an individual or small business to match images against the sea of information out there. Your only recourse is to have a physical paper of license in your hands before you do anything. Somehow, I don't think that was the intent behind Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the United States Constitution - that Congress shall have the power: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." You may as well just lock up the web and throw it away.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Isn't Fruityloops (the music sequencer) made by Imageline ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
douchey lawyer. i dont know how much you must blame him or his bloodsucking lawyer.
uhg
He'd be a corpse... then... NO PROBLEM!
What?!! You were expecting:
Art Clips YOU!
You've nailed the point. Most people don't see all the letters. They only see the one they received and few know the actual history of any art they might be using.
And that's not a 419 (Nigerian) scam. It's the classic mob extortion line: "You've got a nice little web-site here. Be a shame if anything happened to it - along with personally bankrupting you for copyright infringement. Remember those huge statuary damages the RIAA is always suing for...?"
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Give one person with high HP all the health powerups and defense boosters, get that person to tank, get a healer to stand nearby to assist, and everyone else wails on him, duh.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Wow! My Google "clip art alert" system really does work! Checking my e-mails at lunch today, I noticed this Slashdot article devoted entirely to me and my small electronic graphic arts content development company, Imageline. We are honored. First of all, I would like to say "thank you" to those of you who chose not to simply jump on the "sensational" bandwagon, but took the time to carefully read what we are saying and understand what we are trying to do here at Imageline. We believe that our efforts, our experience, our creativity, and our tenacity, will benefit practically everyone who wants to participate in the wonders of the digital art world and the Internet legally. And "hello, Jim!" ... it was great to hear you are still 'active and kicking' after all of these years. I always admired the fact that you were not reluctant at all to speak your mind. That's what successful companies are made up of ... excellent, dedicated, and intelligent people ... with a great work ethic and a common cause.
There's a huge difference between what we trying to do here at Imageline and what the RIAA has been doing for the past few years. I do not believe that the appropriate way to curtail digital piracy over the Internet is to simply try to throw a few college students, uninformed end-users, and/on single moms into bankruptcy ... or into jail.
At Imageline, we ALWAYS go after the "middlemen", exclusively. They are the most flagrant infringers, by far. Not the actual end-users, who, by and large, are the innocent recipients of stolen property, and the victims of the various distribution scams organized and orchestrated by these so-called legitimate "middlemen". The industry calls them "digital pirates".
The "middlemen" I am referring to here are the dealers, the distributors, the "pushers", the web site operators, and the product bundlers (even the counterfeiters), who try to feather their own nests by sub-licensing and re-distributing the hard-earned digital artwork and other property owned by others. From my own personal experience, most of these "middlemen" not only do not respect copyrights or the laws of this country, they do not respect property rights in general, unless, of course, that property is theirs or something they have stolen. It is all very shameful, in my opinion.
Those that have made an honest mistake (and we all do that on occasion) are ALWAYS treated with respect and given several reasonable options by Imageline in an attempt to resolve our disputes and protect their end user customers at the same time. In fact, some of our best friends, and best customers, are people who inadvertently were caught infringing at some time in the past, but certainly do not do that sort of thing anymore. By and large, they are happy people, as well, and have no trouble looking at themselves in the mirror each day.
Every single company we have contacted over the past few years is a "middleman" trying to earn money from goods and services (and sweat and tears) of others, to which they have no rights.
Most of the people responding to this web posting apparently have not even bothered to take the time to read our various communications carefully. Yet they are not hesitant at all to criticize what we are doing. That is a very dangerous, and not particularly useful, way to interact, in my humble opinion.
Imageline owns one of the largest archives of digital vector-based artwork in the entire world, and we have just recently doubled our exclusive libraries with the acquisition of the Image Club Graphics libraries from Getty Images. All of our artwork had previously been developed in-house by talented artists, designers, animators, and digitizers, and by a number of what I consider "world class" independent illustrators under tight "work-for-hire" agreements. The new Image Club libraries begin an entire new chapter for Imageline, and we are all very excited about our future.
Unlike most of our competitors, all of Imageline's digital artwork is also registere
Sorry ... I agree with you. Nothing is more annoying to me than reading un-formatted text. It looked nice when I posted it, but I am new to Slashdot and apparently hit the wrong key. I do appreciate the fact that you took the time to look at both our e-mail communications and our digital images. Thanks for your support, by the way. I forgot to mention that in my earlier post.
Here's an idea, derived from other bright people (imagine that!):
Anyone that wants a copyright has to declare its value, and pay an annual property tax on it of (say) one percent. They can declare any value they like, but only once, and only within a year of creation.
The kicker: total income for the work, from licensing, sales, infringement penalties, etc., are capped at ten times the amount declared. Upon payment (which cannot be refused) from any source, it goes into the public domain.
Not quite as good as getting rid of copyright altogether, but still would solve 99% of the nonsense we're seeing.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Perhaps they could do a sequel to the 2004 film, the tagline could go something like this: "Riddick, all the power in the universe can't nullify his copyrights...this time its personal".
I read the one labeled "ranted about how Microsoft and Google are stealing from him". That's a pretty nice ad for Microsoft Live Image Search don't you think?
Seems as though Riddick Geo III hasn't had the greatest luck in court. Despite his voriferous abilities to bully, harass and cajole, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia replied in it's March 21, 2003 decision of Xoom v. Imageline that, "The district court found that Imageline had no basis for litigating claims of infringement with respect to the individual images because, as registered, the copyright claims were only in the works as a whole and not in the individual images".
/.)
This being a referential case, there's no reason the websites under attack by him shouldn't just take him to task and toss this little gem in his face; he'd be hard put to claim "thousands of copyrights" on every digital image in his collection - and most likely provenance could be shown otherwise under closer examination. Additionally, he's only adding fuel to the flames brewing over the copyright bruhahau (of course, we're all anti-private-property-lovin'-commies here at
"We mean business. We hate digital pirates. We hate hypocrites even more. We never walk away from a case until a resolution in agreed to, or forced through curt order, in writing. We never will." Curt Order, indeed: clean your own house, Georgie, before you decide to bitchslap someone else in their own.
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
If RMS were given a choice between
he'd choose the latter. He created the GPL as the best thing he could think of, since abolishing copyright is not within his powers. In a sense, the GPL is a simulation of abolished copyright. [BSDish licenses are not, because they don't have the level playing field that abolished copyright would provide. (i.e., "I can use yours and you can use mine")]
Check out his writings...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Yes, the designed it this way. It's definitely not a perfect system. But it's a decent system and works that doesn't try to pretend that human nature doesn't exist. It's based on "the wisdom of crowds." Look it up, sometime, it's an interesting theory. Basically, at any given point in time, the system may not come up with the correct result. But the theory is that, given some time, it will work itself out.
You might want to read the section starting "Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary?" on this page. First off, users are randomly given a handful of moderation points. Second, if they post a comment on an article, all of their moderation on other people's comments on that article are undone and they can't moderate that article anymore. This helps keep people who are really vocal about a topic from also being the one to moderate their debate opponents.
Now, this doesn't always work if you have a crowd with a bias and they have to moderate someone who takes the opposite opinion. Unfortunately, the way the summary has been written has created an automatic bias against you. I can imagine an alternate version of the summary where it was spun to present you as the underdog going after fraudulent content repackaging middleman, and how you were a shining example to the RIAA of the way they should be working because you never go after end users of your content, only middleman (at least, based on your claims in your post).
Yet another problem you're having is related to being a new user. Every logged in user (as opposed to anonymous posters that show up as "Anonymous Coward") have a score called "karma." This is based on whether people have generally moderated their comments up or down. Since your very first posts were unpopular, you've gotten bad karma already and your new posts start out at a score of 0 instead of the normal neutral score of 1. Since most people seem to default to viewing only comments at score 1 or higher, this may also make it take a bit more time for you to be moderated up.
The last wrinkle here is "meta-moderation." This is where random users of the system are chose to moderate someone else's moderation. So basically, it's another check and balance. These people will review random situations of moderation and say "this user moderated this comment right/wrong." I'm not sure on the details, but this may determine how often the original moderator is allowed to moderate discussions in the future.
Again, not a perfect system but one with some checks and balances. It's very difficult to have discussion groups on the internet and have them not overrun by crap. Slashdot actually does one of the best jobs out there, I think.
Ah! As it turns out, Riddick Geo III has infringed upon the copyrights of other people! The Sydney Opera House for one. Further down this blog there's a pic of Geo III himself so you'll know the demonic aspect that is the Riddick if you happen to see it coming at you through the dark and dangerous tubes in your neck of the big, bad ©'ed and ®'ed world.
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
Ah ha you fool, that's why I only use white pixels in my artwork!
PS: There's a racism joke in here somewhere but it's the end of the day and I'm feeling mentally drained.
Geesh, in the six years that I've had a Slashdot account, this is the first time I've ever gotten a "first post" and I didn't say the usual "Frosty Pist"
Sorry about that everyone... I know I let you all down
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
George what a nice reply, Did I get your title right ?
I can see your PR agent put a lot of effort into this. You might want to tell to present you with a little more compassion but on the whole its good work. I hope you paid your PR agent well. Do they get royalties' ?
The real issue I have is clipart was originally an add on to programs like photoshop, word etc. You paid the money and you got the clipart disk.
I am fine with that you make your money by selling to people who want that little bit extra.
What I dont like is your now saying I have to pay each time I use the clipart ? What your trying to do here is change the boundaries and turn print media into multimedia and that quite frankly is wrong.
People have tried to do the right thing but do to your greed you want more.
You've got that all wrong, tg, but I can understand that with all the confusion out there today in this crazy market.
We have always licensed our digital images on a "royalty free" basis. This means you, as the licensed user, can use it as often as you like, and on as many projects as you choose to ... forever.
What you cannot do is sub-license or other wise convey the electronic file to others, whether its the orginal file or a derivative file format that you create.
George
Was the last person sued for _statuary_ damages the Venus de Milo? Did you mean "statutory"? Or maybe the mob extortionist was making them an offer they couldn't understand .... :)
Oh, dear. Your patented method for trademarking a copyright violates my intellectual property rights under the PRO-IP act, the DMCA, and also the Berne Convention. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to cease and desist all use of the method covered by your copyright trademark patent.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I think those are good points--abolishing copyright would dramatically change things and a lot of planning and accommodation would have to take place to limit the short-term pains involved.
Considering the long-term, though, it's less obvious whether there would really be dramatic differences. I don't know how you make your living, but my twenty-plus year career has consisted entirely of either writing bespoke software or generally installing/managing/herding/fixing software (all kinds: bespoke, mass-market commercial, GPL, and Open Source). As best as I can imagine, none of that work would have been disrupted at all by abolishing copyright, because the software in question wasn't really that valuable in itself--it only became valuable because I was there to make it work in the situation at hand.
I have also made contributions to various GPL and Open Source projects. I did not do so with monetary compensation in mind, and I believe I would still have done so if copyright had previously been abolished. So, no change there.
In the early years of computing, copyright arguably had little affect on the field, and yet much software got written.
No doubt though many people would be affected. I suspect that a certain amount of software would be funded by groups and consortia that needed the software to exist. Beyond that, I'd be happy to see the government also fund general software at a certain level.
I'm not necessarily saying that all of this would be painless. Like the situations with health insurance and drug legalization, however, the status quo is simply not working, and I think we have to bite the bullet and look for changes.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I'm Canadian you insensitive clod! Since I pay a tax on every CD-R that I buy, I'm immune to your lawsuit-foo
Take that!
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.