Embroidering On a Copyright Shakedown Theme

A grandmother sits in her sewing room and reads a letter that threatens her with $100,000 lawsuits if she doesn't admit to copyright infringement and pay a $300 fine. Not only might she have no clue as to what she did wrong, she could in fact only be a victim of copyright piracy, not a perpetrator. Unfortunately, this is a scene that, with slight variations, has played out again and again across the country, and

Anyone getting such a letter would naturally be somewhat suspicious, but - if you had ever purchased embroidery machine designs on eBay - you also might be rather alarmed. "At first I thought someone was maybe scamming me," says a woman who received the letter in late July. "I decided I could just clear it up by calling the number -- stupid me. They informed me that the CD they were talking about was one with a few flower designs that I'd purchased for $10 on eBay over a year ago. And they said I had to pay $300 'restitution' or they would file suit against me! As I haven't been doing much embroidery over the last year, I explained to them that I'd never used that disk except to check to see if my computer could read it when it first arrived. They persisted in saying I was guilty of copyright infringement even if I hadn't used the designs and they were going to send me a statement I was supposed to sign and send back along with a check for $300."

One of the odd things about the ESPC letters is that they contain little or no information about which allegedly infringement CD was purchased, making it all the harder for the recipient to know what to make of it. "The first letter I received at the end of July did not indicate what I had purchased - it was only after I made the phone call that they verbally told me what it was a set of a few dozen bird designs I bought 15 months ago," says another woman. She had paid about $20 for the designs that she wound up not using because she didn't like them very much. "Apparently the ESPC is suing the person I bought them from on eBay. I don't know if she's guilty of copyright infringement or not, but how can they say I purchased illegal designs if they haven't even proven the person I bought them from did something wrong? Who makes the ESPC the judge and jury? And the seller's name is the only trademark or registration that appears on the design screens I see, so how could I be expected to know if they are pirated?"

On its website, the ESPC states repeatedly that the very act of purchasing an infringing product is itself an infringement punishable by law. That's certainly news to me, as I was under the impression that violating a copyright usually involved making or distributing a copy, not just buying something that turns out to counterfeit. Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but if the design CDs these two women had were bootleg copies, I would consider them victims, not criminals.