If you run a personal or hobby website, receiving a copyright notice from a law firm for an image on your site can cause instant panic. As someone who has previously paid to resolve licensing issues for news services, I can empathize with those who want to eliminate these types of issues.
This is why a new kind of angle-to-angle scheme seems obvious to discover, and perhaps effective. In late March, Ernie Smith, the prolific and inquisitive author of the newsletter Tedium, received a DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice from Commonwealth Legal, which represents Tech4Gods' Intellectual Property Department. received.
The problem was with a photo of the key fob on the legitimate photo service Unsplash that Smith used to post about a strange Uber ride he once took. As Mr. Smith detailed in his Mastodon thread, the purported company required Mr. Smith to “immediately add credit to our clients,” which he would do within “the next five business days.” It is necessary to deal with the matter within a short period of time,” he said. If Smith fails to act, the estimated company would have to “commence” a lawsuit under DMCA 512(c), since removing the images “does not resolve the matter” (many interpretations suggest that The website owner will “act expeditiously to remove” the infringing content, even if the website owner is unaware of the infringing content. The email points Mr. Smith to his main page on the Internet Archive so that he can review “past usage records,” but to no avail.
There are quite a few problems with Commonwealth Legal's request, as detailed by Smith and 404 Media. The biggest reason is that a firm called Commonwealth Legal, theoretically based in Arizona (not the Commonwealth), almost certainly doesn't exist. The company's website domain appears to have been registered with a Canadian IP address on March 1, 2024, even though the site displays a 2018 copyright. The address on the company's site does not match the “4th floor” listed on the website, to say the least.
Law firm websites are full of stock images, but there are also many professional services websites. What's true is the list of lawyers on the site, most of whom, as 404 Media puts it, have the “blurry, thousand-yard stare” common to AI-generated faces. AI detection company Reality Defender told 404 Media that its service detected AI generation in all attorney images “most likely due to a generative adversarial network (GAN) model.”
Plus, there's the lawyer's background, which offers surface-level abilities backed by a bizarre setting. Five of the 12 people appear to have graduated from prestigious law schools: Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. The remaining seven of hers appear to have graduated in the top five grades that could be obtained at “Arizona Law School.” Sarah Walker's practice is based on “Copyright Infringement and Judicial Criminal Procedure,'' a very unusual combination. She may “defend artists' rights,” but she can also “handle high-stakes criminal cases.” Walker said she couldn't have chosen just one career path for her at Yale Law School.
Why would someone go to the trouble of creating a law firm using NameCheap, stock art, and AI images (and apparently copied) to send semi-legal requests to site owners? Backlinks, that's why. A backlink is a link from a site that Google (or another site, but mostly Google) ranks highly to a site that you're trying to rank higher. Whether spammed, traded, generated, or requested through a fake company, backlinks power the gray to very dark market of search engine optimization (SEO). Although search engines boast great algorithmic (and now AI) power, they have always struggled to assess the quality and context of backlinks, which is why some site owners still choose to buy backlinks. doing.
The owner of Tech4Gods told 404 Media's Jason Koebler that he actually purchased backlinks for a gadget review site (with an “AI writing assistant”). He disclaimed ownership of the disputed images and others, vaguely suggesting that a disgruntled former contractor was trying to troll his rankings with spam links.
Als has reached out to Ernie Smith to ask if he has heard back from Commonwealth Legal after five business days and will update this post if he does.