COPYRIGHTS - Contesting Getty Image demand letters

Report here from IBT.

Oscar Michelen, an intellectual-property lawyer who serves as legal consultant for the website Extortion Letter Info (ELI), said he believes the recent lawsuits are less about Getty protecting its copyrights than about preserving the reputation of its revenue-generating collection letters. “I think this is a way to counter the blogosphere,” he said in a phone interview. “There’s a lot of discussion on a variety of websites that, ‘Hey, if you get these Getty letters, they generally don’t follow up with lawsuits.’”