2026-07-31
Inspired by this lowendbox blog post: https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-copytrack-scam-suspicion-of-unauthorised-image-use/
Copyright as a system is inherently unfair in many ways, and this is a perfect example of it. Now it’s likely based on the blog post and reddit thread, that this “Copytrack” company is just a complete scam, but I think there is a deeper issue here regardless.
The idea that you use an image from someone on the internet, that is completely free to download, on your website, and then several years later some large conglomerate is hounding you and demanding money, is ridiculous.
Imagine this is real life, someone leaves a box of fruit out on the pavement in front of their house, and you take an apple, then in 2 years they sue you for £400, claiming they never explicitly told you it was free.
Nobody would defend this, as the person eating the apple had no reason to think what they were doing was wrong. Yet when it comes to copyright and the digital world, someone just being unaware of how image licensing works can get them a huge financial penalty. (One that isn’t even duly owed, as if the person did know the image was under a restrictive license, 99% chance they just find another image, and <1% chance they actually buy and use that image, so there is no real “lost revenue” here)
A similar thing happens all the time on YouTube, someone includes a song or small clip in their video, which is either completely transformative, or totally incidental to the actual market appeal of the video, and their whole video gets copyright claimed for it.
For some reason, copyright infringement, which is quite a nuanced and complex topic with regards to what actually counts as infringement, is treated as a strict liability crime, as if it should be obvious to normal people/small creators exactly what the government (read: US government) has decreed that you may do with the 0s and 1s on your computer.
Shout out to lowendbox for not only advertising great VPS deals (both of my VPS are from lowendbox links), but standing up to copyright bullies as well.
This is another topic I have a lot of thoughts about, and will likely be writing a full article about it at some point on my main website.