The Bloggers Started Filing Criminal Complaints
In 2012, a German law firm called activeLAW spent several months sending cease-and-desist letters to bloggers across the country on behalf of their client hgm Press Michel OHG, claiming copyright violations over published photographs and demanding between €2,000 and €10,000 per image. Industry observers put the number of letters dispatched at over five hundred. The format was carefully calculated: beige envelope, registered mail delivery, large official sum, implicit ticking clock. Many recipients apparently called the firm directly rather than consulting a lawyer and quietly settled for whatever deal was available. That is the model—exploit the gap between the cost of compliance and the cost of fighting back.
One photograph that kept surfacing in the claims was a shot of Nathan Sawaya’s LEGO sculptures, the kind of image that had circulated widely enough across the early blog era that anyone writing about art or design might plausibly have published it at some point. Matthias Winks received one of these demands. It was later withdrawn. He filed a criminal complaint for fraud anyway.
Here, money is deliberately being made from fear,
Winks said. Just the beige envelope, formal delivery by registered mail. Then the sum. I don’t want to know how many bloggers didn’t contact a lawyer, but instead called the firm directly and negotiated a special deal.
The €7,550 demand sent to him had been withdrawn with a vague acknowledgment that someone had made an error. He did not feel like leaving it there.
His reasoning was direct: if a firm cannot actually demonstrate ownership of the rights they are claiming to enforce, they are not protecting intellectual property—they are running a shakedown with legal letterhead as cover. Now the whip comes back,
he wrote. I was supposed to receive a cease-and-desist for something the person demanding it had no legal basis for whatsoever? They wanted to defraud me and many other bloggers, if not extort us. And that is exactly why there is now a criminal complaint in return.
The wider blogger community was advised to follow his lead, or at minimum to demand clear, verifiable proof of rights ownership before paying anything.
What bothers me most about operations like this is the targeting precision. Bloggers are not media companies with legal departments. They are individuals who posted an image they found, probably without thinking much about licensing, and now have an official-looking registered letter on the table demanding the equivalent of a month’s rent. The bet is that most people will pay rather than fight. activeLAW made that bet several hundred times. Then Matthias Winks started talking publicly, the community started documenting, and someone filed a criminal complaint. Elisabeth Michel, Kai H. and Hans-G. Michel: the blogosphere was paying attention, and it turned out to have very good memory.