Who is Copytrack and Are Their Legal Threats Legitimate?

Copyright is part of the overall banner of intellectual property law, and it's a very important part of how we all protect ourselves from theft and rights violations. It is, unfortunately, also a very complex area of law, which means there's a lot of room for misunderstandings, misuse, and abuse.

One name that has come up over the last few years is Copytrack. Who are they, what do they do, and what should you do if you get a letter from them?

Copyright, Blogging, and Intellectual Property Protection

To start, let's talk in generic terms.

If you are a content creator, you produce works that are copyrighted. Copyright protection is automatic upon the creation of the work. Works can be registered with the copyright office, but you are not required to do so to maintain your copyright. Every blog post I write, every image I create, and every photo I take is a copyrighted work. The same goes for you.

For the most part, anything with a copyright cannot be used by someone else without the copyright holder's approval. There are exceptions for things like Fair Use – a very complex topic in its own right – but the ground rule is that if you don't own the copyright to a work, you can't use it.

As a blogger online, you might often make use of material from other sources. Some of those are obviously fair use, like quoting a paragraph from another blog. Others have licenses attached, like images you purchase a license to use either commercially or editorially.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand copyright. They might think that anything posted online becomes fair game for anyone else to use. They might misinterpret website Terms of Use and wittingly or unwittingly circulate scams and misinformation, like the "Facebook is going to steal your photos" hoax/scam that resurfaces every few years.

So, it's not unreasonable to accidentally use copyrighted material without permission or license. It's not unreasonable to find that someone else has taken your work and used it without permission either, whether it's because they legitimately didn't know better or they just don't care.

If you, as a copyright holder, want to protect the copyright on your works, how would you go about it?

You could do Google searches for your content and images regularly, for example. Sites like Copyscape and other plagiarism detection tools can even help with the text-based content you create. Images, though, are harder. Reverse image searches and Google Lens can only do so much, after all.

Or, you could pay someone to do it all for you.

Protecting Copyright with Third-Party Services

This is where third-party copyright protection services come into play. I already kind of mentioned them in mentioning plagiarism detectors, but those are limited in scope, are automated, and are just tools you use.

There are dozens of companies offering intellectual property protection services. They typically have methods and tools of their own to monitor the internet – and offline media, depending – for instances of your intellectual property. They have lawyers who can analyze the situations and, when warranted, can send out letters or get legal threats involved.

What Copytrack Claims to Do

Copytrack is one such company. When you look at their website, they have big promises.

• They find stolen images and help enforce copyrights.
• They have unlimited image tracking and AI-powered image recognition.
• They have automated evidence collection for copyright violations.

They even say that copyright holders of images who use their service receive an average of $351 in compensation for each enforced case.

Sounds good, right? If you're an artist, photographer, or even just a blogger who produces a lot of image-based content, having someone in your corner to help find violations and enforce them seems like a good idea.

Copytrack offers internet-wide image monitoring to look for matches of your images used elsewhere on the internet. They seek out matches and, using their AI, near-matches that might have had editing done to make it harder for exact-match scanning to find them.

All of this information is given to you in a dashboard, and you can evaluate whether or not you want a case to be pursued or ignored. For example, if your images show up on another domain, but it's one you syndicated to or one you gave permission to, you can ignore it. Uses you think of as fair use you can also ignore. Theft, then, you can pursue.

When they pursue a copyright claim, they go through a series of steps.

1. They offer post-licensing; basically, "if you pay us a fee, we'll give you the license, so you don't have to worry about it." If the violator pays the fee, you get some money, and you're good to go.
2. If that doesn't work, they follow up with a threat demanding compensation and the removal of the offending image. Again, if the violator decides to pay and removes the image, you get some money and can move on.
3. If that doesn't work, they can send even more threatening letters to settle out of court, often for even more money.
4. Finally, if all of that still doesn't work, then they'll go to bat for you in court with a full copyright lawsuit. This certainly costs money but could potentially result in a judgment.

How much does this service cost you, you ask? Well, it depends. It's actually entirely free to use for monitoring up to 500 images. If violations are found, and you pursue them, and the violator pays out, then Copytrack keeps a commission. That commission is fairly steep, though; it's 45% of the payment from the violator.

What if you want to track more than 500 images? Uh… shrug? They don't say anything about it on their site.

What Copytrack Actually Does

Now, let's talk about what Copytrack actually does.

There's a concept in intellectual property enforcement called a copyright troll. Copyright trolls are either individuals or companies who weaponize copyright law, but more importantly, the ignorance surrounding it and the complexity of the laws themselves.

Copyright trolls look for anything that could be infringing material and send a threat about it. They often represent themselves as law firms or backed by lawyers, they use a lot of very scary language, and if possible, they weaponize copyright enforcement tools. YouTube's copyright flagging system is a notorious vector for spurious claims, for example.

Copyright trolling is a numbers game. Since using the legal system at all is very expensive (lawyers cost a lot, court fees and other filing fees cost a lot, and the longer it goes on, the more those costs build up), and since ignorance is high, they rely on sending out thousands of threatening letters. Even if 99% of the people who receive them ignore them or appeal through tools like YouTube, it doesn't matter. That 1% paying for it is still money in the bank and enough to keep it rolling.

One of the biggest examples of modern copyright trolling is Prenda Law, which you can read about in great detail in their Wiki article.

Is Copytrack a copyright troll? Signs point to "probably." Some of the red flags include:

• They don't start off with a "cease & desist" letter, which is what every copyright lawyer will start with and is the agreed-upon first step in addressing all but the most serious commercial violations of copyright.
• They do very little to specify their relationship with their clients to the offending parties.
• They charge arbitrary amounts of money for violations with no explanation for their values, which in a legitimate case would be determined by financial damages and other factors.
• They put a short deadline on responding to push time pressure on recipients to pay ASAP before thinking too hard about it.
• They're a German company. While this doesn't preclude them from handling copyright in the United States, it does mean they would need a US-based lawyer on their side, and they don't specify anything more than that they have "legal partners."

These are pretty sketchy, but they don't prove anything untoward is happening behind the scenes. For that, we need to look at other examples. Examples like:

• A postcard from 1790, a photograph of which was flagged on the website of the copyright holder, claimed by someone unaffiliated.
• A photographer whose own photograph was flagged by someone else.
• Another incidence of stock imagery being enforced by non-rights-holders.
• Yet another.
• The official White House photographer being threatened over his own image.
• Hundreds of 1-star reviews on Trustpilot.

Here's what I think.

I think Copytrack provides a service that could, potentially, be legitimate. However, they don't put any effort at all into verifying copyright ownership; they're a more-or-less entirely automated platform anyone can just upload some pictures to and then send threatening letters to other people, hoping for a payout. They may not, themselves, be copyright trolls, but they facilitate copyright trolls with no mechanism to stop them.

It certainly seems like one of those issues where, if you just ignore it, it will go away. I have yet to find a single documented case of somebody going to court from their service.

What to Do if You Receive a Threatening Letter from Copytrack

So, what if you receive a scary notice from Copytrack? What should you do?

The first thing to do is make sure you're not actually violating copyright laws. This hopefully shouldn't be a problem, but I know a lot of people make a lot of mistakes, and if you think they're flagging an image that you legitimately – if accidentally – stole, then you have a decision to make.

What grants you the legal right to use the image?

• If you made it yourself, like taking the photo or creating the graphic design.
• If you purchased a license from a stock photo site or other provider and can prove it.
• If you can verify that the image is released under a Creative Commons or similar license.

The one area that can trip people up is if you took an image you didn't have a right to use, and edited it. Fair use protects specific uses of copyrighted images, for things like parody, criticism, research, and similar purposes. Just tossing a color filter or adding a bit of text to a photo and posting it on your blog generally isn't fair use.

If you're certain you have the legal right to use the image, you have two options. The first is to send your proof to Copytrack and hope they'll go away. Though they are likely to bug you again, as they're done in the past to others.

The second is to just ignore them and hope they'll go away; if they do somehow escalate to a lawsuit, well, you have proof, and a lawyer will be happy for the easy slam dunk.

If you were actually in violation, it comes down to a game of chicken. The ethical stance is to pay the license fee, and then remove the image and replace it with something you have the rights to use before that license expires. The cheaper option is to ignore Copytrack and assume they aren't going to escalate far enough to be a concern.

There does seem to be some evidence that they will, occasionally, actually escalate to the courts. This seems to be very rare and the exception rather than the rule, and largely depends on the entity behind the copyright claims, not Copytrack itself. Like I said; it's a tool, one with a ton of abuse, but some legitimate use.

Have you ever received a Copytrack letter? If so, was it legit? How did you end up responding? Let me know in the comments, I'm curious how widespread it is among my audience.