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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."
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
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
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
And the Internet would be a better place if we get RID of this (insert last four letters of his name here).
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.
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.
What's to stop him from copying an image, placing it on his site, then claiming he owns the image? He'd be hard pressed to prove he owned the image to begin with.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
He had illustrators and computer artists on staff generating clip art from scratch. He paid our wages at times when I know he wasn't keeping up with his own personal bills. (banker in the front lobby waiting to collect a mortgage check)
If there are other matching images out there for free - great, the copyright shouldn't apply and the folks that originally sold those images for use should have an easy time defending themselves. And there really are boatloads of public domain clipart out there. On the other hand, if they can't point to a free source for that image - then they outta be ready to repay George for the all that he invested in creating that image.
It's not the end-user embroidery shop that's the problem - they're being legit, buying rights to use artwork from the real scumbags here - the folks that are grabbing art libraries from whatever source they can find and putting them up for sale as if they own them.
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.
Imageline, Inc registered copyrights on clipart in 1996. The copyright office's search page does not display the actual subject matter of the copyright registrations, so it is hard to tell if the claimed images were in that collection.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
(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.
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.
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.
That's not a real solid defense. I would say not to use discs sold at garage sales if you're running a professional operation. Using an image when you have no idea who the rightholder is would be a bad idea.
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.
That mixes the notion of copyright (where images can be duplicated) with actual objects that can't. But, just for fun let's say I can prove only I make/sell those jeans. Well, if I know I'm the only one who sells the jeans, and I didn't sell you the jeans, and you're wearing the jeans...
...Then yeah, you either stole the jeans or are in receipt of stolen property. Just like in the current scenario.
Now, if it were me I'd send a C&D to people who are using the stuff before actually pursuing litigation, because it is kind of a d*ck move to demand money. But from a legal standpoint, I do believe he has the right to do what he's doing, though I'm most certainly not a lawyer.
I realize there's a required minimum number of posts before becoming real - for the moment, I can only aspire to be real with post #2 here.
I just wanted to stick my nose into the conversation to vouch for the effort that I know firsthand George put in to creating the image libraries that he sells in various forms.
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.
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?
I realize there's a required minimum number of posts before becoming real - for the moment, I can only aspire to be real with post #2 here.
There is also a 2 car analogy minimum.
--
My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
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."
But, just for fun let's say I can prove only I make/sell those jeans. Well, if I know I'm the only one who sells the jeans, and I didn't sell you the jeans, and you're wearing the jeans... ...Then yeah, you either stole the jeans or are in receipt of stolen property. Just like in the current scenario.
To make this about clipart again (since physical items aren't the same as data on a disk), let's say I can't remember where I got the clipart from, but I'm reasonably sure I got it from a backup of an original disk (that had been destroyed) that a friend of mine gave to me because he no longer had any use for it, and he bought the original disk from some guy ages ago, doesn't remember who this was and that person most likely doesn't have a receipt anymore? Would you say it's a clear-cut "YUO STOEL FROM ME!!!111" situation then?
Because that sounds a lot like what's going on, and to take it to the jeans analogy: I got a pair of jeans from a friend of mine, he got them from some guy in his dorm who most likely bought them years ago and now a Levi's just sent me a threatening letter telling me that I've been spotted wearing a pair of their jeans in public and that they have no record of ever selling me a pair of their jeans. Does that sound even remotely sane?
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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 competi
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.*
It strikes me that there are a few issues going on. First there's the question over whether the guy really does own the copyright to these images. It should be the fundamental question and the ultimate focus of the issue. But a lot of attention is being drawn elsewhere; by the guy (George Riddick) himself.
He's made grandiose claims that search engines are to blame. Either he really believes search engines are to blame or he's using the big names behind those search engines to gain attention.
His letters to individuals employ numerous methods often also employed by con-men. They request / demand confidentiality. They are hostile and threatening in nature. They seek to uncover information that one wouldn't normally be interested in providing to a hostile party. They induce an artificial sense of urgency. They attempt to induce costs and complexity. And they are ultimately light on detail of the matter at hand - the actual copyright infringement.
That's not to say that any of this negates a real legal claim. But the showmanship is distracting. The more someone waves their hand around, the more attention you should pay to what it is they're hiding.