404 Media: “Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a “copyright infringement notice” from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: “We’re reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client,” it read.  I am familiar with these sorts of emails, which are frightening to get. In an earlier, wilder day of media, it was relatively common for news websites to use images that were tagged as “Creative Commons” on Flickr and sites like it. But some of these images were improperly tagged by the people who uploaded them, which wasn’t always the person who originally took the photo. This led to a series of expensive lawsuits, or the threat of lawsuits which led to expensive settlements, for media companies who did this. Both VICE and BuzzFeed, for example, deleted thousands of photos from old articles apparently to ward off copyright lawsuits.  In this case, though, the email didn’t demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a “visible and clickable link” beneath the photo in question to a website called “tech4gods” or the law firm would “take action.” Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its “lawyers” are AI generated…”