I'm a member on a popular image site. It now appears that another site has gone and ripped quite a few of the images from various artists from the site. They have notified this person that he is in violation of the copyright of the image owners. The idiot replied with: I guess this guy is still under the impression that everything online is up for grabs unless it's specifically copyrighted. What should be done in a situation like this?
This guy is being a price. Be a prick back. CC his hosting company, their upstreams, and all relevant government agencies in whatever country he is in on every correspondence. Also, file written claims with Google/Yahoo/MSN and try to get him kicked out of the search engine indexes as a copyright violator. Copyrights are almost impossible to enforce without paying lawyers a significant amount of money. In effect, you're screwed. All you can do is make sure he suffers more than you do.
If I understand your post correctly, these are not images taken from a site you own and they are not images you own? The owner of images is the one who needs to take action against the other site. It's also unclear if the owner of the site is posting these images, or it is members of the site? There is a difference as far as who is legally responsible. If the site owner isn't posting these images, he is probably doing the right thing in asking for proof of ownership. How else is he supposed to know who owns the images, his members or the site they stole them from. I know you know they were taken, but he does have a right to ask for proof. A person does not get off the hook for taking a copyrighted image and then removing if the owner requests it. Use a copyrighted image without permission and the owner of the image can require you to pay a hefty usuage fee AND remove the photo. There are also extreme cases of people getting jail time for copyright infringement - it can be a criminal offense.
You need to send him a notice via postal mail. If you emailed me something legal, I would tell you the same thing--as would any other professional. As to criminal offense, it would need to be very extreme. Copyright infringement is a civil offense. To cross over you would need to be one of those guys who runs a shop selling nothing but pirated material.
The images in question is not from a site I own. The site from which the images have been stolen is www.caedes.net . Images are sumitted by their various creators for the sole purpose as use as wallpapers and to get feedback on them. The pirate site: http:// ripoffREMOVEbritain.org / wallpaper / The owner uploaded the images himself. There are loads of files most of which I'm sure are also stolen from other sites. I'm just looking for some opinions on which actions to recommend to the owner of Caedes.net seeing as I'm there in a moderator capacity.
Your offender is a Brit, so you will want to CC these four addresses: 'abuse@nic.uk'; 'webmaster@aacp.co.uk'; 'webmaster@intellectual-property.gov.uk'; 'webmaster@patent.gov.uk' You can find out more about UK copyright law on these two web sites: http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/indetail/basicfacts.htm http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/ This fellow knows full well that he's guilty and he expects you to go through the hassle of proving it to him. Well, actually, he expects you to blow it off and let him go about his way. In Great Britain, copyright is granted as soon as you create an original work. There is no requirement to register to receive copyright -- therefore there is no real "proof" of copyright. This jerk needs to read the law.