A Reddit user who posted meanspirited remarks about a Flickr user’s photo was called a jerk by the photographer. To get back, the critic posted a tiny thumbnail of the Flickr image (which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) to Reddit along with a complaint about his treatment. Now the Flickr photographer has upped the ante by sending a threatening legal notice to the Reddit user, in which he claims to be a lawyer and says that linking to the photo and reproducing its likeness in thumbnail is a copyright violation. The photographer goes on to threaten the Reddit user with $150,000 in damages if the thumbnail isn’t removed. I’m not sure if the photographer is really a lawyer (lawyers can be as petty and immature as anyone — even people who trawl Flickr looking for creative works to piss on), but if he is, I don’t think he understands US copyright law very well.
(Thanks, Kandinski, via Submitterator!)