Few things jump out at me.. 1. It cost $3000, not $8000 - what the lawyer originally demands doesn't have much to do with how much it costs. Still a lot of cas

Few things jump out at me.. 1. It cost $3000, not $8000 - what the lawyer originally demands doesn't have much to do with how much it costs. Still a lot of cash? Sure, but less than half the title. 2. If publishing material is your business, it's pretty strange that you don't know some basics of current copyright laws. The list of "even ifs" is a bit worrying/misleading. Someone knew the image was copyrighted, since that's the default unless it's expressly royalty free. DMCA safe harbour is meant for providers that display user-generated content, not publishers who write and (presumably) edit blog posts. 3. What would the author of this post do if their copyrighted content (maybe a blog post?) was published on another site for profit? Maybe they'd send a nice takedown notice, maybe they'd ignore it and hope for the exposure, but maybe - especially after a while - they'd have a lawyer ask for some money, if they thought it was hurting their business. So, yeah. Heed this lesson if you publish stuff, and use the heaps of royalty free images out there. Or (gasp) pay for them.