Just as there are patent trolls who acquire intellectual property on the cheap and then attempt to extract payments from large companies, there are those who take advantage of laws designed to protect the works of artists and authors. Their targets, typically, are small publishers who might not appreciate their own vulnerability until they're hit with a complaint. Take Jim Kaplan, the publisher of Record Collector News. In 2020, Kaplan was sued by Indianapolis-based rock photographer Larry Philpot over a picture of Tom Petty that appeared on the publication's website. The image wasn't credited. Kaplan offered to right the lapse, but Philpot's lawyers were only interested in money. Kaplan settled the suit. He can't talk about the terms because of a confidentiality agreement, but it hurt badly enough that he moved to shut down the paper's website, switching to print-only. "There was a kind of beauty to the beating I took," he says.
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