Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim_Gunn
Are you an attorney? If so, I'm not surprised by the bad advice. You're missing the point that there is almost never anything to fight or any reason to run scared like that. When a former model calls up or sends an email or rarely sends a form letter from an attorney friend they only hope that you'll immediately cave in. 99.9% of them have no money and zero intention of ever following up with actual litigation.
It's real easy to politely tell former models that you have sold, re-sold and licensed the content a million different ways to entities and web sites out of your control and that it's completely out of your hands if they have your number and call you up on the telephone to put you on the spot. If they email, or have a form letter sent, it's real easy to just ignore it completely as you can almost guarantee that absolutely nothing will happen after that.
And, as I mentioned earlier- if it only does take you five minutes to "pull content", then you have no business to speak of and no idea what you are doing as a webmaster.
|
It is just a cost/benefit analysis, and valuing your TIME. Let's say you have a photo you paid $XYZ for, and years later, someone brings a bogus claim but won't press it if you take it down. If you value your time at more than $100/hour let's say (i.e., instead of dealing with frivolous bull shit you could be making $100/hour elsewhere), and the time value you have to spend dealing with a cease and desist (or litigation) is more than what the image is worth (minus the money you already made), then you "settle" (remove the image).
You gotta take emotion out of it and look at it in dollars and cents. For example, a dude claims age discrimination against your company and you know it is complete bullshit. The dude will take a $5K severance and sign a release agreement, or you can spend 100 hours of your time in depositions, paying lawyers, etc., for an uncertain outcome. Most rationale business folks who can afford the $5K will pay that instead of the latter. A perfectly logical business decision, i.e., "don't sweat the small stuff".
Now if the image in question is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or whatever (doubtful), then of course, perhaps you fight it. But again, I sense we are talking about an easily replaced image. So you can spin your wheels, ask GFY for help, call lawyers, and waste a lot of time, or pull the image from the database....
And finally, of course you can play poker and say, "I'll ignore, she won't press it." That's a reasonable approah and should be considered, but if you are wrong, it can be a painful lost pot.
The savvy folks on this thread are like, "who cares, take it down and move on." They value their time more than dealing with frivolous bullshit.