Leslie Burns burnstheattorney.com Extortion Letter San Diego California

I see many people are getting these letters.  When you get a letter demanding many, many thousands of dollars and threting you by saying you will face federal litigation it can be very scary and frightning.  Most dont even know we have a image that could have a copywrite on our site.  Most of the time our images are under the Fare Use. What is "fair use"?

Fair use is the right to use a copyrighted work under certain conditions without permission of the copyright owner.  As long as you are not making any money on these images you should be ok although like others have posted.  You need to take the image down asap.  How its legal for someone to send bots out to your site and fire off threttning letters is defnatly a gray area. 

From my talks with a profesional atterney he felt like the letters sent by Burns the attorney were over the line and defanatly suspect of extortion.  It sounds like these types of letters are very typical unfortanatly.  The good news it it would cost these scammers over a thousand dollars to actually file legal action against you so they are just looking to get any money you have without going that far. 

No scammer is trying to pay out money. Its very unethecial and unfortanatly somewhat legal although its a gray area that they ride.  In this case she has stocked not only the site I had the image on but has stocked my socal and other locations online to see if she could rattle me.  I am looking into ways to report this to the bar. 

I recomend anyone that gets these letters speaks up and puts an end to this type of extortion letter.  https://www.calbar.ca.gov/public/complaints-claims

I do hope this helps you if you have reveved one of these letters.
In short..  Remove anything that you need to and be done.