Anti-Infringement Company Caught Infringing On Its Website

danomac writes "Canipre, a Canadian anti-infringement enforcement company, has been using photos on their official website without permission. This company hopes to bring U.S.-style copyright lawsuits to Canada, and they are the company behind Voltage's current lawsuits. It says right on their website, 'they all know it's wrong, and they're still doing it' overlaid on top of the image used without permission. Multiple photos from different photographers are used; none of them with permission. Canipre's response? 'We used a third party vendor to develop the website and they purchased images off of an image bank,' they said, trying to pass the blame to someone else. Some of the photos were released under the Creative Commons, meaning they could have used the photos legally if they'd provided proper attribution."

Comments

On shifting the blame

[mark-t]

Trying to shift the blame to somebody else does not diminish one's own involvement in the situation. Much like knowingly purchasing stolen property is crime, knowingly possessing works that are known by the possessor to be infringing on copyright (that is, any copies that can reasonably be known to be unauthorized, and are also known to not fall under any exception covered by fair dealing) is also quite actionable by law.

So really, their best course of action is to simply identify the third party that they obtained the infringing content from, because at least then the regular penalty for infringement would be applied to the third party and they themselves could then at least argue that they did not previously realize they were infringing (they would still lose license to use the works, however, since they would still be infringing, and if they continued to try to use them, they would be guilty of knowingly possessing infringing content).