It was already a difficult day, and then in my mail:
To whom it may concern at Arnold Zwicky’s Blog,
Copyright Agent US, Inc. works with professional photographers and leading image agencies across the globe to protect their copyrights on the internet.
We hereby draw your attention to an image used on the following link: [https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/26/from-south-america]/ (herein after the “Image”). [this is my 5/26/2012 posting “From South America”, with pictures of a flowering Jacaranda mimosifolia tree in South Pasadena CA and a florist’s assortment of Alstroemeria cultivars in various colors (both originally found on Wikipedia, I believe, but that was 13 years ago)]
Our Partner, Visions Video & Photography, holds the rights to represent the Image in question and they are unable to find a license purchased under your company’s name or domain. Accordingly, we are contacting you to ensure that the appropriate license was obtained. It is possible that you have acquired the correct license for the Image, for example, from the photographer themselves or your creative agency under a written sub-contract. If that is the case here, we ask that you provide evidence of proper licensure to allow us to review your case.
Infringement is unauthorized use of intellectual property. In essence, it deprives the rights holder of the benefit of their original creation. If no evidence that a license was purchased is provided, then a payment claim would be required to resolve and compensate for the illegal use of the Image. This will also avoid the need for judicial intervention if the matter is not resolved.
You can log in directly and pay this claim here: [URL]
Let’s summarize. Copyright Agent (CA for short) assumes my blog is a company, with a staff. They refer to an image on an arnoldzwicky.org link — which contains two images, and I have no idea which they’re referring to. They then say that the image is under copyright to their partner company, which does business under various names (I’ll just call them Visions here); that I have violated these rights; and, cutting to the chase, that I must now pay a claim for illegal use of the image or be subject to lawsuit. The claim amount is nowhere stated. CA provides a URL for paying the claim. I am not rising to the bait.
Checking out the Visions company (website here), I see that it’s a botanical image database (apparently very large), providing images for advertising and other commercial uses. From their website:
For over 30 years Visions B.V. is the proud and sole copyright owner of the VisionsPictures collection. Besides continuously improving our collection by adding the newest and best images, we also help our clients maximise their sales by licensing them our best images.
Due to the exponential growth of the Internet over the last 10 years, many internet users have found a way to gain access to our images through social media platforms, Google images or through the websites of our clients. Unfortunately not every user is aware of, or respects the copyright law and therefore downloads and uses our images without a valid license or without our authorisation.
To protect our images as well as our clients, we have started a collaboration with 2 companies who help us to identify these users and put an end to the copyright infringement.
On some previous occasions, I have been notified that some image I used in a posting was under copyright, and had the choice of removing it from the posting or paying a fee. Since I live on a small fixed income and provide my writings for free (and in fact pay to have my postings free of ads), I can’t afford such fees and so just delete the images. (More recently, images mostly come with statements about their copyright status; I’m then increasingly unable to find usable images to illustrate many ordinary things.) But CA offers me no such choice; I have already broken the law and must now pay up.
I am not compliant.
Today’s reading from the gospels comes from the book of Monty Python, in the chapter “The tale of the Piranha Brothers”:
Interviewer: But the police have film of Dinsdale [Piranha] actually nailing your head to the floor.
Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.
Interviewer: Why?
Stig: Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.
Interviewer: What had you done?
Stig: Er… well he didn’t tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy.
October 2, 2025 at 12:35 am |
I’m decidedly not legally qualified to make a judgement on this topic, but it seems to me that if the image did in fact appear on Wikipedia, either the supposed owner licensed it to Wikipedia or they should be going after Wikipedia rather than you. But of course proving that you got it from there would be challenging.