That's not true. Statutory damages can be calculated/estimated from the market price of the work, which the copyright holder is missing out on by not getting the sale. Torrenting movies doesn't generate profit for anyone, but you're still liable if the MPAA manages to track you down with enough evidence to bring a suit against an individual.
I guess I was thinking about using photos in things like forum posts. Movies is a different matter - members of the general public routinely pay for movies. Members of the general public don't routinely pay for photos in a forum post - this is not where photographers get their income stream from. Hence hard to prove damages.
And even then, the MPAA, despite it's considerable legal power and ability to get laws altered, still has a difficult time getting damages out of people. "In 2011, for example, the producers for Hurt Locker sued almost 25,000 BitTorrent users—and almost all the claims were voluntarily dismissed by the studio, because it was taking too long to track down all of the defendants via their IP addresses."[1]. That's not difficult for the reasons I said, but it's still difficult, and that's talking about a violently litigious entity with very deep pockets. A regular company or a freelancer is going to have an even more difficult time.
Right, it depends on being able to reliably trace the violation to a particular individual. That's hard over bittorrent, not so hard when it's a company's website or a personal blog.
>Members of the general public don't routinely pay for photos in a forum post
Just because lots of people do it doesn't make it right. Rehosting someone else's photo is a violation of their copyright, and should require that you buy a license for the photo. If it's not for sale, then you can't do it, period.
