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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."
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.
It's also highly likely that versions of at least some of them were around before Mr Riddick's businesses claim to have 'designed' them. In the early days of graphical computing clip art got copied around even more than it does now. In this case if someone had authentic prior art, and could demonstrate it, they could sue Mr Riddick for copyright infringement, which would be deeply sweet.
If you were producing graphics on a computer before about 1986, it could be well worth scanning your collection for images which match any of the disputed images...
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Actually, this is an often under-noticed area of copyright infringement (It looks like actual illegal infringement to me, but IANAL). My mother has several CDs full of images that she uses to decorate shirts, blankets, etc for her grand-kids. They cost her ~$5 apiece and are filled with lovable Disney characters that have been copied out of movies or TV shows, interpretted into embroidery patters, burned in bulk to CD, and then sold. My mom, of course, uses the logic that, since she paid for the discs, there's no way that she could be doing anything wrong. I'm sure that Disney is aware of the situation and is frustrated that they can't suck the blood from these spinster pirates because of the bad PR involved with suing confused grandmothers. At least that's my take on it.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
(Umm, you just triggered my "astroturf" alert. This is the only comment Slashdot has you on record for, so I can't get a grasp of whether you are real or not.)
Your argument is wrong in that it tries to place a burden of proof on every amateur website out there, something that is silly. Cliparts from the Eighties have changed hands many, many times; disks sold at garage sales and copy/paste make it impossible for a hobby webmaster to keep records. If we were to use your metric, then almost all of the web would be easy prey to copyright lawsuits.
No, I have to disagree with you there, Mister Former Riddick Employee. If someone is actually selling cliparts, well, OK. That's worthy of legal action. But merely using a picture and not remembering if you bought it or not? Please. You may as well accuse me of shoplifting because I can't produce the receipt for the jeans on me arse.