The Cease and Desist

The cease-and-desist letters started arriving in waves. activeLAW, representing a Berlin image agency called hgm-press, began sending them by the thousands. They’d apparently bought up rights to thousands of photographs and figured out they could make money just sending lawyers after bloggers. The demands were usually around five thousand euros per image. Sometimes more.

They didn’t distinguish between anything. Didn’t matter if you’d credited the photographer or even had written permission. They’d run Google Image Search, find your blog in the results, send a letter. Autodino got hit for nineteen thousand euros on three photos. We Like That got dunned for three grand on a picture of some artist nobody had heard of. When they came for me it was five thousand for a Lindsay Lohan shot I’d posted years earlier.

What made it possible was the law itself. Germany doesn’t have fair use. In America, you can share an image for commentary, reporting, inspiration—that’s why sites like Tumblr and Pinterest exist. Here, reposting someone else’s photograph without explicit rights is illegal. Full stop. The law doesn’t distinguish. Doesn’t care why you did it or how you framed it.

So you’re running a blog about culture and design, and you realize you’re legally exposed every time you embed an image. Not because you’re being careless. Because the law doesn’t allow for context. It’s an impossible minefield.

Most people just paid. That was the whole point. They knew you couldn’t afford a real court fight, so they sent letters until the money came. It was predatory in the cleanest sense—no complexity, no subtlety. Just identify creators, wait for the payment. The effect was clear enough: it made you less likely to create online, to share anything, to riff on culture and respond to it. Maybe that wasn’t the intended result. But it was the result.