The Indy Star reports that a man named Rich Bell has been suing people for unauthorized use of his photo of the Indianapolis skyline. Some people, according to Bell and the Indy Star even replaced Bell’s copyright notice with their own.
But not everyone is on Bell’s side.
Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted in the article as arguing that the legal penalties are disproportionate to the crime: “Those really high penalties create an incentive to embark on litigation campaigns.” And unnamed people are quoted in the article as calling Bell a “copyright troll.”
It seems to me that people shouldn’t steal, and I’m not convinced by arguments that the Internet has made it too easy to do so, or that everyone is doing it. It’s also apparently pretty easy and common to shoplift, but we seem to have much less tolerance for that.
Why?
The photo and more details are here: Copyright infringement lawsuits make Indy skyline photo worth a lot more than 1,000 words.
