Photographer sues Getty Images for $1B for being billed for her own photo (2016)
As a business model it makes perverse sense:<p>1. Use bots to vacuum up as many images as you can online, and claim ownership.<p>2. Use bots to search for infringement and automatically send claim letters against them.<p>3. For any pushback, have a team of lawyers and clerks of various grades to deal with situations as they escalate. Push or capitulate after sizing up the opponent.<p>Most people either just want it over, or don't have the means to fight back for any length of time. The money you make from such a scheme would far outweigh the legal costs due to the scale of the automated income.<p>It would only become problematic if someone else started a rival company, at which point they'd need to set up an oligopoly agreement to avoid destroying one another with their bots.