Copyright Trolls Now Going After Random Bloggers Who Reposted Photos
Apparently, the Copyright Enforcement Group (CEG), one of the earliest copyright trolling operations in the US, is really building up its copyright trolling photo business. Last year, we wrote about how CEG had gone after a Lindsay Lohan fan site because the young fan had posted some (you guessed it) photos of Lohan. And now it appears that it’s ramping up the practice, as a number of sites have apparently received demands from CEG for $500 because they posted a random photo which they likely found via Google’s image search. Yes, reposting photos in such a manner can be copyright infringement (though, quite frequently, there may be a very strong fair use defense – but that’s very context specific), but it really does seem quite scammy to go after clearly naive internet users, who are just trying to post a photo of a red pepper to go with a blog post about vegetables.