George Riddick — the One-Man RIAA of Clip Art

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 3, 2009 @02:40AM from the sue-you-sue-anybody dept.

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."

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Re:What's the problem? by Saint+Fnordius · 2009-03-03 04:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

(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.