Feel the burn, I know a guy

I have been dealing with a new variation of annoying lower back pain which still seems to emanate from the SI joint area.  I have had a SI belt for quite awhile.  It’s worn low across the hips and has helped me deal with this sort of issue pretty well until recently.  The first time I recall having this new flavor of pain pop up was during the New York trip.  Every morning I would wake up and feel like I was stabbed in that area for a period of time.  As the day went on it normally would subside.  I had it in Roatan as well but I was hoping to write it off to not sleeping in my own bed.  Well it still is going on.

It has mutated a bit again where it almost feels like a tingling burn aka nerve pain. It can wake me up in the middle of the night if I am in a position that aggravates it. The pain still is worst in the morning but can rear it’s head randomly.  Yesterday I was at my desk and had a burn that was so uncomfortable I had to stand up and adjust my leg to make the sensation which was shooting down my side, go away.  Right now I am hoping that consistent use of the SI belt will help this fade away.  I’ve also been looking at some stretches to “pop” the joint to hopefully bring some relief.  I just feel like a dam that keeps springing little leaks, I only have so many fingers to plug them with.

I have been wanting to relate this story for quite awhile but the person involved wanted to make sure there was enough cool off time (statute of limitations) to ensure no further action was coming.  So these events happened somewhere between three and four years ago.  This person writes a blog where he talks about whatever comes to mind, it’s just a personal blog, nothing that resembles a commercial venture.

So this person out of the blue received a letter in the mail from some company that said it represented another company that provides stock images on the internet.  In the letter it had a screen grab of the blog post which had the image in question.  This image was something that was grabbed from a Google image search at one point.  Evidently the name of the file was not changed which is how the image was identified, more than likely.  So this letter indicated that this was an infringement of copyright and demanded a payment of $700 for it’s use.  There was a deadline of 30 days to make the payment or else “further action would be taken”.

Well of course this letter freaked the guy out.  Immediately he searched online regarding this scenario and found out that this shakedown has been going on for awhile, people getting popped for using images on their website that they grabbed online, not knowing of the potential issue.  This guy found a message forum where these threat letters were discussed.  The advice was generally that they were empty threats however in a few rare cases more action was taken.  There were also some people that just paid the money for peace of mind.  So this person made the decision to remove the image and the blog post that contained it and just sit tight.

Two more threatening letters came spaced a few months apart, each one asking for more money as penalty for ignoring the previous version.  Finally the letters stopped and my guy thought he was in the clear, he was wrong.  A few months later a letter came from a lawyers office stating that the claim was now turned over to them for legal action since the guy ignored the previous attempts for collection.  This time it was not just letters.  Emails started showing up and voicemails on his phone asking for him to respond.  This was getting serious and again the monetary ask was increasing, now more than double the original $700.

This new threat was aggravating and caused anxiety however the decision was made to continue the policy of persistent ignoring.  The originating email domain and phone numbers were blocked however a couple more letters did arrive, again threatening to escalate the stakes.  The gamble that a law firm was not going to spend money to locate and prosecute an individual that mistakenly used a copyrighted image in a non-commerical web site paid off.  Eventually the threatening letters stopped and the pursuit was presumably over.  Valuable lessons were learned of course, any images obtained from an internet search are no longer used in this person’s blog.  If there is something that he deems worthy it would be obtained by a screen grab and renamed randomly, making pursuit pointless.

It was a stressful scenario in this person’s life, reminiscent of when I was prosecuted by the national park service for a drone violation, via the internet.