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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."
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.
From reading tfa & links, I got the impression that the individual embroidery sites were doing the right thing and pointing back to the vendor(s) where they purchased the artwork. To me, they're off the hook at that point. I wasn't always wild about the licensing agreements that were used with the clipart libraries & I don't support blanket scare tactics to weasel money from mom-n-pop embroidery shops, but I do think whoever is collecting the money for use of the clipart libraries ought to hand some portion of it over George.
Yes, I also have no personal stake in the matter but nonetheless feel obliged to stick my head above the parapet and put on the public record my unbiased opinion, namely that you need to suck the very fattest part of my asshole.