Class Action Law Suits Against Photobucket


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beiland

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I'm sure many of us have been affected by the Photobucket debacle. There is an older modeler on this forum that has been, and has documented some of it on his discussion subject thread,..
http://www.modelrailroadforums.com/...acle-creek-mining-timber-co-rr.18172/page-232

I posted this a few moments ago
According to US Copyright Laws YOU own the copyright on those photos. So I think any good lawyer should be able to secure your photos for yourself. They DO NOT OWN them.

Don't know about where you live, but here in St Augustine there is an attorney who specializes in helping the elderly getting justice from our government,...and our government has very special rules controlling copyrights, patents, mail fraud etc.

If I were you I might try looking up any class-action suits, and attorneys that might have some connection to Photobucket cases. I'll bet there are a number of them.

I had to find such a class action site against a misused/rip-off photo enforced commuter toll road on I-95 at one time in the past. The overseas managing company finally had to rescind there charges against me when I treatened to join that class action lawsuit.

There is just NO GOOD reason you should not be able to recover YOUR OWN PHOTOS,...and with their stupid watermark REMOVED !!!!

Perhaps a GOOD attorney can find a way to make a few dollars on this action,...not from you, but from photobucket?
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Are there others out there that have investigated this situation and might be able to lend some knowledge??
 
I was a huge Photobucket user and loved it from 2006 until they redid their user-interface around 2015, thats when it got slow and clunky but was still sort of usable. But when they instituted their blackmail policy in 2017 and broke the internet is when I,along with thousands of others, said enough is enough and pulled my photos from them and refused to pay their extortionate demands. I’m sorry to be harsh but anybody still using Photobucket after 2017 deserves exactly what they get from Photobucket. Photobucket broadcast exactly who and what they are back in 2017.
 
beiland said:
Did you have ANY resistance from them in that regard?
And did they remove their watermarks on you photos??
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Back then there were no watermarks on photos...no intentional resistance per se, but it took a couple of tries because their site was so buggy...plus it was time-consuming to actually remove the photos....I suspect that was because tens of thousands of people were removing millions of photos at the same time.
 
cv_acr said:
Anyone that is complaining that PB is "holding their photos hostage" and they should be able to get their originals back, etc.

Basically anyone involved in the lawsuit or starting this thread...
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PeeBucket DID hold my photos hostage, on every website, every forum post, every blog that I ever posted a remote imaged photo on, since PeeBucket started, that I used their service. Every single one of those places removed my photo, and instead put a "upgrade your account so everyone can view your photo" image in its place. Our options were 1-suck it up and pay their ransom, or 2-let all those images go away, and ruin every post, story, blog, and even Ebay auction that used those images. In many cases, especially on forums, there is a time limit, as far as how long before you can no longer edit a post or image. In my own case, that was over a decade's worth of photos on different forums, with a 15 minute editing window, leaving all those places with broken images.
 
I still fail to see what the legitimate case for the suit is?

While the way PB changed their terms and locked down photo linking was extremely poorly done, you can't always expect any online hosting or business to necessarily be permanent, and if PB's storage was the only place you had your photos, you didn't have local backups, and you "couldn't get them back" that's not really PB's responsibility.
 
I think in the orignal instance PB was seen as changeing their terms of service with little to no warning and subtley trying to blackmail longtime users with a “pay what we want or we’ll break all your links and make your blogs/sites worthless” type of tactic while giving users almost no time or easy and simple way to remove their photos. I’m not sure if this latest change warrents a lawsuit....but again, trying to claim the photos are the property of PB or placing PB watermarks on them again seems pretty shady. And again I repeat what I said earlier...PB was until about 2015 a great platform but they have now consistently shown themselves to be not only very untrustworthy but their platform has really been crap for at least 4-5 years. Anybody who keeps using them going forward from now deserves whatever happens.
 
The original owner sold the site back around then. I can remember him getting shoved to the side, answering complaints.
If they should win the case and be given the rights of ownership of the photos, then it would raise the possibility of even if you shared them yourself direct from ones you have stored on your computer, or elsewhere, they could claim copyright over them.
 
tootnkumin said:
The original owner sold the site back around then. I can remember him getting shoved to the side, answering complaints.
If they should win the case and be given the rights of ownership of the photos, then it would raise the possibility of even if you shared them yourself direct from ones you have stored on your computer, or elsewhere, they could claim copyright over them.
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What has this got to do with ownership and rights to photos?

It's just web hosting that used to be free and now isn't...
 
cv_acr said:
What has this got to do with ownership and rights to photos?

It's just web hosting that used to be free and now isn't...
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Go to the referred thread's link (Jim, HO Explorer) re claims of ownership in Beiland's post #1 in this thread.
 
cv_acr said:
What has this got to do with ownership and rights to photos?

It's just web hosting that used to be free and now isn't...
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It's very obvious. If you put your photos on their site, they own them, not you. Even the ones on your home computer are now theirs, because they are copies of images they now own, by virtue of them having them on their site, and claiming them as theirs. I don't know how you can't understand this.
 
bnsf971 said:
It's very obvious. If you put your photos on their site, they own them, not you. Even the ones on your home computer are now theirs, because they are copies of images they now own, by virtue of them having them on their site, and claiming them as theirs. I don't know how you can't understand this.
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Because that's not how it works.
 
Just for giggles I opened a free account on PB last night and uploaded a photo that I don’t care about and then used it to 3rd party link to my blog. It seems they got rid of most but not all of the bugginess that has plaqued their website for the past 5-6 years. Loading and copying pics to my blog was easy. The lousy thing is yes, they are watermarking the pics, which they never did before, “Proudly Hosted on Photobucket”. The fortunate thing is the watermark is in the lower left quadrant of the pic so it doesn’t really impact the view of the pic.....but if the idea of their watermark itself isn’t enough reason to not use PB then the actual wording of the watermark is....especially the word “Proudly”.
 
Never having used this before - I am wondering?
Gene - Can you print your uploaded photo from the website?
Does the print have the "watermark" on it?
Do you retain the uploaded photo on your computer too, or does it disappear to Photobucket?
 
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