Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A recent amendment to my 3/30/16 posting “Back to Braunschweig” chronicles some legal events in my blogging life:

The Braunschweiger sausage of my American childhood, in a tasty sandwich:

[7/30/19: The photo of a liverwurst sandwich has been removed, in response to this message from the law firm of Higbeee & Associates:

We represent the photographer Adlife Marketing & Communications Co., Inc.& Communications Co., Inc.. Adlife Marketing & Communications Co., Inc.& Communications Co., Inc. is a professional photographer who licenses images to make a living. We noticed that the work of Adlife Marketing & Communications Co., Inc.& Communications Co., Inc. is being displayed on a website that we believe you either own or operate (See Exhibit A).  Further, we could not locate any records that indicate that you have a license for such use.

… If you do not have a license, please contact us at […] or call us at  […] to resolve the matter. … We need to know how the image(s) came to be on your website to discuss compensating Adlife Marketing & Communications Co., Inc.& Communications Co., Inc. for the time of infringement and costs that have been incurred as a result of the use of the image(s).

The Higbee firm has made something of a lucrative specialty of threatening lawsuits over  the use of photographs on the net, requiring that the photographs be removed (as I have done here with the liverwurst sandwich photo) and then that the user pay a hefty fee for its appearance on the net. (I wouldn’t dare describe this behavior as a scam, because that of course would be actionable in itself.) This is not my first brush with them (see below), but this particular occasion has a certain onomastic charm to it, since the “professional photographer who licenses images to make a living” in question has the remarkable name “Adlife Marketing & Communications Co., Inc.& Communications Co., Inc..” I’ll bet their parents rued the day they chose that name out of the baby books.

In any case, the killer liverwurst sandwich photo came to me on a Pinterest board several years ago, posted by someone who got it from a 2008 WordPress blog posting about meat.

Then, from my 12/29/17 posting “News for penises: artwatch”:

(#1) Painting, signed by Carolina Falkholt, on Broome Street

[Photo of the penis mural removed. It turns out that it was from the NY Post, where it was credited to photographer William Farrington. Attorney Mathew K. Higbee is now threatening to sue me, on Farrington’s behalf, for large amounts of money for unauthorized use of the image… Part of my response is to remove the image.]

But they still demanded that I compensate the photographer. I did not. Now here we go again.

End of legal digression.]

We will now have another round of threatening e-mail and phone calls. Life goes on.

This entry was posted on August 5, 2019 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Language and the law, This blogging life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.