CEG TEK Copyright Infringement Notifications

Hi, everyone. This is John Di Giacomo. I’m an attorney and partner with Revision Legal. We are an internet law firm with an specialty with copyright law. I’d like to talk to you today about CEG Tek. CEG Tek appears to outsiders to be a new player in the realm of commoditized copyright infringement take down notices. In reality, CEG Tek commonly known as Copyright Enforcement Group has been around for a pretty long period of time. Again, as we go through this conversation, I want to stress that this is not legal advise and I am not familiar with your factual situation. You should certainly consult with an attorney with regard to any issue that you run into with CEG Tek.

At the outset, CEG Tek is basically supported by the offices of Ira M. Siegel from my understanding. What the have been doing is sending out notifications of infringement to third parties demanding approximately $500 per photo infringed. These third parties often include celebrity blogs, celebrity websites or websites that contain celebrity gossips. A lot of these sites are actually licensed contexts which is a real problem with CEG Tek. We’ve gotten a lot of calls on that issue. Some of the sites that provides us licensed context are Rope Entertainment News Network and AMK Images and GSI Media.

From our experience, these sites have been the ones that had been targeted for CEG Tek take downs. If you got your license context from the site, that may be the reason why received a take down notice from CEG Tek. A lot of times it’s dealing with celebrity content so just be aware of that if you want a celebrity blob website. If you are targeted by a CEG Tek copyright infringement notice, what should you do? Well, first, you should identify whether or not your content or not is licensed. If your content is properly licensed then there is no viable claim for copyright infringement from CEG Tek. It’s important that you do some background research to determine whether or not your content is in fact properly licensed.

Second, you should determine whether or not your use of the content complained of is protected by law. For example, fair use may apply because fair use applies to accurate news report. If you must use a photograph for a news report, it may be that the use of that photograph falls under fair use. It is important that consult with an attorney  concerning fair use questions and the reason is fair us is a very fact dependent analysis. In trying to do the fair use analysis on your own usually doesn’t work out. It’s very difficult to do, you realize substantially on case law which may change between circuits so I highly recommend you contact an attorney if you believe that your use is covered by fair use.

Third, you should asses your risk do determine whether or not it makes sense to simply ignore the take down notice. Attorneys typically will not tell you to ignore a take down notice. In this case, it appears that CEG Tek is not actively suing individuals who ignore their notices. That may change in the future, and we don’t know, but it is something that you should be aware of and when you’re performing an analysis of your risk, that is an important factor. If you have any further questions, be sure to contact your attorneys. Again, my name is John Di Giacomo. We are Revision Legal. If you’d like to contact us, our phone number is 855-473-8474. Thank you for watching.