Haves vs Have Nots

The activist (open source) game development team I am on has recently unleashed a tittle wave of productivity and are about to complete one project we have been working on for over 10 years (2nd Edition of the Squawk Role-Playing Game.) But maybe the most important project I have been working on lately is the Resilience Role-Playing Game, which I am hoping to have a hard-copy book version of this year. One insider knows there is a significant creative difference between how the online version looks and what the final product will look like, and has question this decision.

While the book uses photographs and a lot of them, the website only uses illustrations. Each and every photograph is being personally vetted by me to make sure it's 100% legally legit before I use it (we've been doing this open-source thing since the mid 90's and have a lot of experience with copyleft.) Yet I refuse to use photos on the website because of the Ghetty Images "extortion scheme."

Ghetty Images (or someone on behalf Ghetty Images) has some kind of bot that constantly crawls the web looking for people who use images that Ghetty Images considers themselves to have control of. Once they find such an image, if that website does not have a pre-existing agreement with them, Ghetty Images sends a letter to the web provider shutting down the website. Ghetty Images always asks for thousands of dollars to establish an agreement with them so that your website isn't shut down. The trick is they ask for a few thousand dollars less than it would take for you to get a lawyer. This has never happened to one of my projects, but it did happen to minority immigrant friends of mine who own an auto glass repair shop in Seattle in the late some time around 2009.

The image in question was:

1.  from a website that specifically gave anyone on the internet permission to use the image (Ghetty Images has a way of purchasing rights to collections of these kinds of images,) and 
2. was heavily modified as to without that permission be within the terms of "fair use." 

However the Ghetty Images bot discovered the photo, and the ACCUSATION was made. The ACCUSATION does the damage regardless of guilt or innocence.

When I was doing an internship in the Education programs at the King County Jail on 5th Ave in Seattle (2003-2004) through Americorps, I saw numerous people do something called "a plea for time served." Let's say a cop ACCUSED you of some wrong doing and throws you in jail. While you wait for your lawyer, the more law abiding you are, the more damage is being done to your career and your family by your absence as time goes on. After you have had some time to simmer in jail for a while, the prosecutor offers you a deal: say you are guilty, and we'll let you out of jail now, no more questions asked. If you are a career criminal with money you fight it, and probably win against their usually weak case. But if you are a law abiding working class citizen, you take that plea before you lose any more of time from your job or family than you already have.

It's the ACCUSATION that does the damage.

Back to Ghetty Images, if a lawyer typically costs $7,000 in your area, then they will ask for $3,000 to $5,000. And that's just it, law abiding working class people get criminal records in Seattle constantly for the crime of not having $7,000 to pay a decent lawyer who isn't in the cop's pocket. (Public defenders rely on the court system to give them referrals. The prosecutor is part of that system, and too many victories is going to encourage that court system to direct their referrals elsewhere.)

There's a lot of problems in Seattle with housing, addiction, income and healthcare, but those problems all impact rich and poor to one degree or another. What the rich never feel is the raw, pure injustice that happens when you can't afford your own lawyer. I know a lot of people don't like hearing this, but the difference between a have and a have not is only about $7,000.

The moral of the story is this: pick your battles. You can die on almost any hill you want to die on. However, you need to reserve your personal resources for whatever matters most to you in your life, which is probably not some hill a loud personality is waving a flag on the top of.