The Other Sharks Out There

It's a dangerous world

Last week I received a disturbing lawyer’s letter. Attorney James Harris from Citi Legal Services wrote to me that in the sample chapter of The Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom hosted on my website, there was a picture of a snow leopard which appeared without attribution. And he said that it belonged to his clients, who run a website about big cats, for which he provided a link. He warned me that I have five days to correctly attribute the picture. He said that I had to provide a link to their website, and that taking down my file was not an acceptable option. Here’s the picture - an extraordinary and unique photo of a snow leopard about to pounce:

This was upsetting. But when I checked my encyclopedia, I saw that the picture does not actually appear in it! Nor did it appear in the PDF of the sample chapter available from the museum’s website. Yet it did appear in the sample chapter hosted on my old and defunct website, which I had put up 14 years ago. It seems that for the final version that went to press, I did not end up using the snow leopard picture.

Still, the picture did appear in the PDF that was still being hosted on my old website, even though there was no kind of link to it anywhere. I checked with my lawyer and he groaned (at least, that’s what it seemed like over email). He said that he sees many cases of lawyers trying to shake people down for copyright infringement, even when there was no real abuse. I would have to make the correction in the file, he said, but this likely wouldn’t end it. After I had made the correction, they would probably charge that I had thus admitted that I took it from them unlawfully and demand hefty compensation. And we would have to present a defense about it being “fair use” (a broad and vague legal category), for educational use, not for profit, and so on. It would be messy.

This was getting even more distressing. Still, there was nothing to be done other than comply with their request. I would have to edit the file (that nobody ever sees) and correctly attribute the picture to the Big Cat Facts website.

I had no memory of where I had taken the photo from all those years ago. So I went to the Big Cat Facts website to check it out. Here’s a screenshot from the “About” page:

Wow, this was a serious outfit. They even have an office with a huge sign displaying an awesome logo! The website was incredibly professional, with a huge range of information and photos about different species of big cats. It received praise from biology teachers and conservationists.

Still, as professional as it was, something was off. The website was absolutely full of ads, which is not the norm for educational websites. And I couldn’t actually find the snow leopard picture.

Then something occurred to me. How had they found that I was using their photo, if my sample chapter wasn’t even been linked anywhere online? They must have used a reverse image search. This is a search engine whereby instead of using words to find a picture, you upload a picture and see where it appears. These lawyers had the job of using such engines to see where people’s pictures were being used and to take action. So I decided to use such a search engine myself with the snow leopard picture.

The results were amazing. It appeared on the internet hundreds of times. Some were random websites about big cats, most were websites offering free stunning photos of nature for desktop backgrounds. This was a picture that was in the public domain!

But who had actually taken it in the first place? Well, you can order the search results by date, and the first version of the file had the name of a person on it. I searched for his name and found that he was a wildlife photographer who had died several years ago. Did Big Cat Facts really have exclusive rights to his photo? I reverse-searched some other pictures on their website and found that they were floating around everywhere in the public domain. I suspected that Big Cat Facts had actually done the same thing with the leopard picture as I had apparently done - use a photo in the public domain.

And so I wrote back to James Harris at Citi Legal Services, stating that I would be perfectly happy to correctly attribute the photo, but first I would like to see some evidence that Big Cat Facts actually owned exclusive rights to the photo in the first place.

Then I decided to use a different reverse image search engine. This presented an even more interesting result. The snow leopard picture appeared on a page in the Flickr photo sharing website, with a license that allowed it to be used without payment as long as there was attribution, and even without attribution for “Fair Use.” The page itself belonged to Land Rover, whose cars had apparently been used by Biosphere Expeditions for a trip with scientists to the snow leopards’ natural habitat in Russia. Biosphere Expeditions itself also hosted the photos on their own website, free for anyone to use!

At this point, it was pretty clear that Big Cat Facts had no more rights to the photo that I hadn’t even published than I did. That was great news! Still, I was bothered by the immorality of it all. James Harris from Citi Legal was trying to shake me down for money that Big Cats Facts weren’t even entitled to. I discussed it with another friend who is a lawyer specializing in IP law, and he said that he entered the field because he thought of it as a noble profession, and gets very upset when he sees lawyers trying to take advantage of people.

What kind of person does such a thing? I was curious about James Harris, and so I decided to find out more about him. I looked up the website of his company, a Boston-based law firm called Citi Legal with a slick logo whose website has all kinds of articles about diverse aspects of law. James Harris was one of a dozen lawyers that make up their team:

James Harris’ bio said that he was Stanford-educated. Well, after all the anti-Israel protests, nobody thinks much of Ivy League schools anymore. But I couldn’t find any other references to him online. There were plenty of James Harrises - that’s a common name - but none who looked like him and none who were trained at Stanford. Apparently he likes to keep a low profile. For a sleazy lawyer, that seemed to make sense.

On a whim, I decided to also look up Emma Johnson and Simon Montgomery, whom Citi Legal said were trained at Harvard and Boston. I found lots of people with those names, but none who appeared to be lawyers that were trained at Harvard and Boston.

Citi Legal’s address was given as 1 Beacon St, 12th floor, Boston, MA 02108. I searched for that location online. It’s a large building with all kinds of businesses. But none of them appear to be a law firm called Citi Legal.

At this point I realized what was going on.

There was no Citi Legal. There was no James Harris, no Emma Johnson, no Simon Montgomery. Just an impressive website with an AI generated logo, AI generated team of staff, and AI generated collection of articles about law.

Likewise, there was no Big Cats Facts organization. No office with a big sign, no team of biologists or even writers. Just an impressive website with AI generated pictures and AI generated text and AI generated reviews and other pictures taken from all over the internet.

With some further online research, I found out more about the scam. It’s not even to get people to pay money for alleged copyright infringement, it’s to get people to post links that generate traffic to websites that make money. They apparently have an automated system that looks for pictures which appear without attribution, creates a website with those same pictures, and sends threatening emails from fictitious law firms that make people post links back to their website. The goal is to boost the traffic to their website and get people to click on the ads.

There’s lots of different types of predators out there, and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. And with AI, it’s getting difficult to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. Be careful!