This is good research. But honestly you come off a bit condescending. Should Dr. Lui really know how to handle the situation where an international, billion dollar company steals his art from a blog he wrote? I was thinking to myself, I have no idea how to get in touch with Netflix. If they did something like that to me, I might go down the same path he did.
I’m glad you gave him the information he needs but let’s give him a break.
"Should Dr. Lui really know how to handle the situation ..."
Yes he should. This [1] is literally the second link to the Google search "what do I do if someone steals my photograph" and it has a nice check box of things to do which includes this step:
Do some research
Find out the infringing person’s name as well as their contact information.
This information is often available in the website’s “About Us” section.
Use a website such as WhoIsHostingThis.com to learn the website’s ISP. This information may be necessary later
Typing "Netflix General Counsel" into Google gives you the address of Dave Hyman as the first link.
Based on that I think it is well within the GP's expectation that Dr. Lui should be able to figure that out and send a letter to Netflix demanding either they stop shipping their product or retroactively license his imagery for $<x> where he might want to consult with a Photography Agent to understand what size 'x' might represent.
Great link! In fact according to this Dr. Lui actually did all of the right things. Let’s recap:
The link says “make a copy of the infringed work.” It seems from this blog post and what he sent to the customer service and PR link he certainly did that.
“Determine that the use was actually theft.” Again I think Dr. Lui did that as well. It seems he has at least a basic understanding of copyright law.
“Do some research.” Well he has a hard time finding the corporate information for Netflix, or even a phone number. In his post he points this out. So as a means to find that information he did contact customer service. I guess he could have contacted their isp ;) which is another suggestion that your link gives. But I’m not sure he would have found any additional help by doing so.
My point is two fold. First, your helpful checklist isn’t actually that helpful in this case. Second, he actually followed all of those steps. I guess he could have googled for Netflix corporate. This would have shown him officers and directors. Whether that would be useful is hard to tell. It’s also important to remember that General Counsel is an American term. It does not always translate outside of the US.
Thanks for your replies! Along with your other reply here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15794032, I do think both sides could have done better, but it not a path sufficiently well-traveled. The issue at large seems deserving of some best practices love: e.g.
1) All inbound corporate communication channels should have an escalation path to the registered agent / general counsel.
3) The directions in 2) need additional guidance language for international issues.
4) Maybe 1) should have a link to 2) or something like it, but for more general legal issues / workflows.
I can see that in this case that a web search would have helped, but the root of every complicated, multi-party, decision problem is probably not going to be found on the first page every single time. In 2017, I'd strongly argue that it really should be.
He’s an Australian. That doesn’t give him much leeway. Rather ironically, Netflix has prevented VPNs due to copyright infringement. It’s hyopcritical of them not to deal with those in other geographic areas than the U.S.
Something like 1-5% of the news.ycombinator front page is customer service escalations.
I don't think it's totally crazy to write a blog post & publicize it on social media as an alternative to the traditional executive-email-carpet-bomb. It's not necessarily the best strategy but it's certainly not the worst.
I completely agree with that, and it isn't crazy to write a blog post about it. That said, a blog post that had his written letter to the general counsel and Netflix's unsatisfactory response to that, would seem to merit escalation. Dr. Lui seems to have made a good start but it is early days yet it seems to me.
Talking to a rich corporation’s GC without any idea about how to turn your claim into leverage is like asking a mob consigliere to pay the cleaning bill after one of their guys murdered someone in your pizza shop. At best they’re going to ignore you or tell you to piss off. At worst they’re going to try to intimidate you into silence. Either way, “just email their lawyers” is likely a fruitless endeavor without your own to push the right buttons.
Eh. He made a good-faith attempt to contact them. The first person he talked to told him who to contact. If there's an error here, it's on the part of Netflix, not Dr. Lui.
Why can't we program our <something> support departments to act on information they're given? Why do we need to program these departments like they're half AI zombies?
For all we know, they DID act on the information given... and sent him down a pointless rabbit hole to prevent him actually taking the correct steps to address the problem. After all, Netflix is in the wrong here... and I don't know of any corporation who will happily assist someone in filing a grievance against themselves. On the contrary, if someone is sending repeated emails about something that could potentially be a lawsuit, I'd guess my lawyer would advise the same thing -- ignore it unless they actually file paperwork.
Think of it like getting pulled over for speeding -- Everyone knows you did something wrong. But when the officer says, "Do you know how fast you were going?", do you respond with "Yes, officer, I was going 31 in a 25. Please give me my ticket now." No, you admit no wrong and hope they don't push it so you get away with it.
Because it is in Netflix best interest if he doesn’t get a laywer. He said the images can easily go up to $600 and I believe this is truly what he would have gotten if they asked. Now since he they took it without asking, he probably could get a lot more (it is after all used as promotional material and there are a lot of ads for it). If Netflix wanted the copyright infringement to go away as quickly, and cheaply as possible, they would just pay him without lawyers on his part who would probably advice him to go to court.
You’re analogy with the police office is a bad one for this example. Image you dumped another can without you realizing that. Fortunately for you, the other person does not call the police immediately. Instead, they manage to track you down and send you a letter asking you to pay for the damages. You can assert that this did in fact happen because their paint is on your car. This is in your best interest. You really don’t want to get charged for a hit and run. You are glad he did not go to the police, pay the damages and send a nice apology letter. Netflix probably did not know about the copyright infringement. It probably was made by a design company. Netflix should have know whom the VGA cassette originates from, but they did not and this is unfortunate but can happen. It is in netflix’s best internet to go away silently.
What I believe had happened is that he was sent to the wrong department. That department saw the email and though it was not authentic/a fake to quickly export money or baseless. A company must get a lot of emails: “you owe me money because xyz”.
> A company most get a lot of emails: “you owe me money because xyz”
That is my point. It is their best interest (although not best ethics, arguably) to ignore and deflect such people unless they take further action to prove they are serious. At that point, someone from their legal department would certainly take a look, and in this specific case, act on it. I agree with your statements once someone has shown they are serious. But a call to CS and a couple emails don't yet put this guy in that category, despite his totally legitimate complaint.
"Typing "Netflix General Counsel" into Google gives you the address of Dave Hyman as the first link." Fairly sure thats incorrect. I found no mention of their corporate address on a *netflix.com domain, just a bunch of head quarters aggregators.
On my machine, the first link in the search results is to the ir.netflix.com pages (ir stands for Investor Relations) which has the list of directors and managers. That is a Netflix owned page. And if you click the 'annual reports' link it shows the corporate headquarters address at the top. So you are correct, it is two clicks to get both the name and address of the general counsel from Netflix.
And while I don't necessarily expect anyone to know off the top of their head that the top legal contact for a company will be called their 'general counsel', there are many many many stories on the web about people who have had their photos misappropriated and used (from travel brochures to bus stop ads) and doing any research at all would give you a clear sense of what the right course of action would be to do here. Further I would expect anyone with a PhD to be familiar with how to research a new topic of interest, to evaluate sources, and to derive the key principles underlying the system if they were widely understood and published (like image copyright is).
I don't know why I would contact the general counsel of a company if they stole my work. I'm not an artist, but I have made some art, and if someone stole that art I would call the company itself.
Additionally, I've tried calling the corporate number for a number of companies in the past, and oftentimes they are just a message that says I should email them if I need to contact corporate. SF companies are particularly bad with this, I guess paying people to answer the phone is a waste of money.
If your customer service can't figure out how to escalate legal issues, that sounds like the fault of the company, not the fault of the person who is trying to bring legal issues to their attention.
“General counsel” is the title given to a company’s chief in-house legal officer, so it would indeed be contacting the company itself (and the person at the company most likely to be able to properly handle the situation, at that).
That said, finding somebody a little farther down the chain in the legal department might yield a faster initial result at most big companies; this type of infringement is comparatively small potatoes for the GC.
I've never worked at a company large enough to have in-house counsel, so I figured that it was a title given to the entire legal department.
I work in marketing, and it drives me nuts when people say "well we didn't know about this because people didn't contact us in the correct manner." If there is a way to contact you, assume that someone will use it to contact you about literally anything.
People assume the structure of their organization is obvious because they are familiar with it. Someone trying to contact the organization should not have to divine the nature of the beast like a bunch of blind men trying to determine the nature of an elephant.
In the US, you want to send mail to the registered agent.
That's the person on file with wherever they incorporated who accepts legal paperwork during business hours -- and thus can always easily be reached by mail. Companies are required to have one of these, and they'll deal with routing legal complaints internally. Just send your angry letter with tracking to the registered agent, so you get a signature when they drop it off.
For Netflix, it seems like:
> The address of the registered office of this corporation in the State of Delaware is Corporation Trust Center, 1209 Orange Street, City of Wilmington, County of New Castle, Delaware 19081. The name of its registered agent at such address is The Corporation Trust Company.
So if you send your angry mail there, Netflix legal will almost certainly read it.
> if someone stole that art I would call the company itself.
"The company itself" is a finite set of humans with jobs. Dave Hyman's job is to handle legal issues involving Netflix. You're saying that the best course of action to resolve this legal issue involving Netflix is to call the company's tech support?
> that sounds like the fault of the company
OP is already dealing with a fault of the company. Declaring that the company has a second fault isn't helping.
I've called customer service because I've been burned by malfunctioning products before. I received a replacement product in addition to some financial compensation.
I'm sure that's the sort of thing legal handles, and therefore customer service must have a way of contacting legal.
I think it's beyond reasonable to expect contacting the customer-facing representatives of a company should be sufficient for almost all matters.
Yesterday I was going to reply to your other message in this thread, but I decided to let it go. However, your "it's beyond reasonable to expect" phrasing has piqued the issue once again.
You work in marketing. I do not, but I assume that marketing folks view communication as a good thing. After all, your job is to present your company's message and get responses from potential customers. Communication equals success. Thus, it makes complete sense to you that that customer service would be a catch-all for any incoming communication.
Consider instead someone who works in legal. For them, in almost all cases like this one, avoiding communication is a victory. Status quo is preserved if people go away, and ignoring people often makes them go away. That department absolutely does not want to ensure that customer service faithfully passes on all relevant communication. The more CS is a black hole, the better.
You need to distinguish between these two types of inbound communication. You repeatedly make statements like "it's beyond reasonable to expect," "If your customer service can't figure out how to escalate legal issues, that sounds like the fault of the company," and "Someone trying to contact the organization should not have to divine the nature of the beast." These statements might make sense in the context of a potential customer communication where both sides want to make a deal. But they sound clueless, entitled, and whiny in the context of an inbound communication from a non-customer and potential litigant like OP. Do you think Netflix cares that they didn't make it beautiful and seamless for randos to obtain compensation for copyright infringement? And do you think they care that you're so very disappointed in them?
It's odd to be frustrated at a company for avoiding or delaying the rents and friction of running a company. That's what they're supposed to do. In fact, a shareholder would be frustrated at a company that didn't do this. I doubt you're interested in taking advice from me, but since this frustration is a running theme in your posts, and because most people want less frustration in their lives, you might consider a more nuanced expectation about how companies should behave -- especially when your current expectation leads you to make irrational and self-defeating choices like contacting customer support instead of legal for a legal matter.
On a similar note, should a lowly customer service rep trained to respond to cancellation requests and login troubles be expected to address intellectual property rights?
I worked at a rather well known social media company for a bit. A good portion of our customer service was for password resets or general complaints. But we had well defined copyright escalation path that started with the lowest of the lowly customer service rep and ended with the general counsel. So yes, actually, I do expect that.
A customer service rep doesn’t have to have all the answers, but they should be equipped to find them, or at least find a next step (which they did, in this case).
The author didn’t handle this optimally and neither did the CSR. Should they need to? I’d prefer to live in a world where each party does their best to approach a happy resolution in spite of mistakes. In this case whoever reads the PR mailbox dropped the ball.
> Should Dr. Lui really know how to handle the situation where an international, billion dollar company steals his art from a blog he wrote?
Yes, he obviously cares enough to write a big blog post; he shouldn't have done that, instead he should've gotten a solicitor and gone through the proper legal channels. If he's lucky he'd get a regular one-time payment for use of the pictures. If he's really lucky those would end up a bit higher than the cost for the legal procedures.
OK let's say you are a private person in the USA and want a solicitor for legal action against Australian company. Where would you even start? How much is that going to cost you? How is that more reasonable than leveraging social media?
Social media can’t file a lawsuit and a lawsuit is how you solve these issues. You have to prove infringement, you have to present evidence. You don’t “try” your case on the phone with Netflix. You file a lawsuit, you wait for an answer and then typically you settle out of court. Copyright infringement that is easily proven against a company like Netflix would be a slam dunk case — there would be attorneys that would take that on a contingency basis because it would be so easy: likely two or three letters sent and a stop by the courthouse to file the lawsuit — then a settlement offer of $5000 or so, with $1800 going to the attorney for barely 2 hours work.
You don't start with a lawyer. You start with a letter before action, which sets out what they've done wrong and what you want them to do about it.
This is very simple. There are plenty of example online. It would be roughly "I created, and own, these images. You've used them without permission, for a commercial use. You understand the importance of IP and copyright, and you defend your own rights. I'd like you to buy a licence at my standard rate of $X, plus a Y% uplift for commercial use by an organisation that should know better. I expect payment within 28 days."
When you're interacting with big corporations you need to speak their language. We see this in claims of copyright infringement, but also in open source projects that don't get donations from big corps - because they don't offer the "order, invoice, payment" cycle that corporations expect.
Specifically, re: 2), the way that was pointed out was condescending, as is your implication that contacting support - which is one of the few publicly visible contact points - is "clearly" "unorthodox".
The "Seriously, calling the tech support line for a copyright infringement?" parts sounds like it could be calling out the author for doing something you feel should have been the obviously wrong to them.
I can't argue against having that part in there -- I wasn't personally offended I, and it's important to give what you write your own voice -- but it is good to know the kind of reactions that your writing will illicit.
(Just a side story -- I once posted a comment on a forum that was entirely meant to be sarcastic. Someone missed my sarcasm and responded with what turned out to be valuable information. Since then, I've tried my best to strip anything that might be unnecessarily negative out of my comments, but I'm sure stuff slips through....)
Funny, I often do ignore sarcasm if it serves no useful purpose. People sometimes get offended by answers they get or are just
dumbfounded. Personally, I'm more often than not irritated when someone uses it as it tends to derail discussions. This thread is a nice example ;).
I’m glad you gave him the information he needs but let’s give him a break.