Image Copyright Infringement

The unforeseen liability for playing it fast and loose

Thank you Eunice Park for this helpful post, and thank you also to Casey Botticello for the additional resources he provided in his response.

As an editor for a sizable non-medium-owned publication, and an attorney, I have taken up the editor’s version of the role of the police’s dreaded Internal Affairs — I have become the bain of every hedge fund trader’s existence — The Compliance Officer.

The more resources I can tell the other editors they can both accept and to which they can guide writers, the less they will see me as the anti-writer Gestapo, when truly my only interest is protecting publication owners from the FACT, unrealized or unaccepted by most, that under the governing intellectual property laws, and Medium’s terms and conditions, publication owners are liable to copyright owners for infringement.

Many publication owners operate under the misguided belief that the writer and Medium are the responsible parties. This is false. While the writer surely has liability, Medium’s attorneys constructed it to be shielded by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Publication owners are not only exposed but unbeknownst to most, each and every publication owner and each and every writer have agreed to indemnify Medium — if Medium gets sued, it will sue you.

I lay all of this out in detail here:

Thank you for reading.

In Rama I create,

Marcus