Statement: the IP lawsuit against Stereogum is a red flag for artists

The following statement can be attributed to Lia Holland (they/she), Campaigns and Communications Director at Fight for the Future:

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that August Image LLC is trying to take down Stereogum with a lawsuit over images a sister site posted fifteen years ago. This is a weaponization of copyright laws that are supposed to protect artists. Instead, copyright is being used to attack a beloved indie music site that has been doing incredible reporting on music and art for years. This suit should be a red flag for creators everywhere.

August Image LLC’s lawsuit seems very similar to the practice of copyright trolling, in which bad-faith companies are using AI bots to scan through the histories of websites to find any image that is under intellectual property restrictions today, and demand thousands of dollars for every instance. The problem is, many websites don’t have their image licensing records from fifteen years ago—and the trolls generally have no proof that the image was even under the same copyright restrictions that far back. Yet, these cases are costing websites like Stereogum a truly damaging amount of money just to defend themselves, much less to pay the trolls.

If copyright trolls keep it up, the only longstanding websites that will be left are those that are owned by tech and content billionaires. Artists need independent, alternative websites that act in their interests now more than ever—and copyright is being weaponized to make sure that they won’t have these crucial resources anymore. Can we get a statute of limitations on these sorts of claims and kick the trolls out of their copyright goldmine please?”