Website Owner Beware Part 2

In my previous post I warned the WA community about a law firm threatening website owners, bloggers and folks with social media accounts with lawsuits for copyright infringement violations. Hopefully you read the post and shared it with others because if this firm targets you it may very well have a negative impact on your financial situation.

The law firm I refer to is Higbee & Associates in California. The founder is Mathew K. Higbee from what I have been able to learn on the internet.

In my previous post I described the threatening letter I received from this law firm.

In this post I want to update what additional information I have learned about Higbee & Associates Law Firm and none of it is good.

I found a number of posts on a website by the name of complaintsBoard.com regarding the Higbee Law Firm, but this one in particular I am pasting below is especially of interest. If you want to learn more you can search Higbee & Associates at the complaintsBoard.com website.

Post from ComplaintsBoard.com website:

Anne7213Aug 24, 2018

Do not confuse creativecommons.org with creative-commons-images.com. Creative Commons (the non-profit organization) is not affiliated with the scam website Creative Commons Images.
Mathew K. Higbee, Nick Youngson, RM Media Ltd, and Alpha Stock Images are perpetrating a creative commons extortion scam using the Creative Commons Images website.
Creative Commons is an American non-profit organization.
Creative Commons licenses require that users provide attribution to the creator when the material is used and shared. A Creative Commons license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon creative works (photos, images, etc.) as long as credit is given to the creator. Typically, attribution consists of displaying the image title, author, source (often including a website link) and license in a reasonable manner.
Creative Commons offers licenses and tools to the public free of charge and does not require that creators or other rights holders, such as licensees, register with Creative Commons in order to apply a Creative Commons license to a work. Therefore, image licensees have not formal license documentation---no proof of registration, no receipts, etc.
Higbee and Youngson abuse the copyright laws by filing copyright registrations over effortless and mundane images. They then make those images available for free on creative-commons-images.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 3.0) in exchange for "attribution". The images are owned by Mr. Youngson. Rights managed licenses for those same images for a fee on Alpha Stock Images website.
The Creative Commons Images attribution requirements and guidelines are purposefully convoluted, difficult to follow and change frequently. They do this so they can later 'catch' people using the photos without proper attribution. Then use the Higbee & Associates law firm to bully victims with scare tactics and harassment in order to extract money to “settle” purported copyright claims with damages of up to $150, 000.
The Creative Commons Images website (creative-commons-images.com) is owned and operated by RM Media Ltd (rmmedia.ltd.uk), a UK-based corporation founded by Nick Youngson (nyphotographic.com), which also does business as Alpha Stock Images (alphastockimages.com).
Mathew K. Higbee lives at 3409 Calle Del Torre in Las Vegas, NV and is registered to vote as a Republican in the State of Nevada. His main office is located in a small strip mall office suite located at 1504 Brookhollow Drive in Santa Ana, California. He has set up virtual office addresses in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Washington State. When you look at these "office locations" on Google maps you can see that they are also just tiny office buildings--one is shared with a barber shop. If you Google the addresses you'll see dozens, if not hundreds, of other business using the same addresses as virtual offices to make themselves look legitimate or large.

The "Ripoff report" also has some posts referencing the Higbee Law Firm's practices:

https://www.ripoffreport.com/report/higbee-associates-law-fi...

There are also references to the Higbee & Associates Law Firm at The "Debanked" website:

https://debanked.com/2018/04/usury-suit-by-higbee-associates...

Here is another website by the name of "TechDirt" with even more references about Higbee & Associates:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190213/18080341591/calli...

If you Google Higbee & Associates you will find a lot of results.

Again....I am putting this out here because all of us in the WA community are aspiring online entrepreneurs and so all of us may be targets of the Higbee & Associates Law Firm.

I do not want anyone in the WA community to be targeted so PLEASE take this post seriously!