A few months ago, I received a strange letter that appeared to be from an attorney's office. At first, I thought it was a scammer trying to scare me into sending money (a lot of money) to avoid being sued over a picture I had been using on a website and a facebook page.

Of course, I had carefully searched for a free, open source image to use as I was not in a position to pay a license fee for what I considered something very simple.

What I found was a nice picture of a lone tree. Very similar to what I might find around my rural home here in Yuba County. Unfortunately, it was the middle of winter when I needed that image and I wanted something spring-looking, so my usual practice of taking my own photos for use on my web sites was set aside in favor of this supposedly free open source image.

Turns out the image I used came from an web site that was physically located over-seas and had collected a large number of images. The images were watermarked as their own and the metadata changed to match.

Completely illegal but, being located overseas, is mostly out of reach of US legal enforcement.

Long story short, I spent way too much time dealing with extraordinarily obnoxious people and cost me a lot of money for being an innocent victim of poorly designed copyright laws that lend themselves to certain lawfirms designing a business model to take advantage of those caught in this unfortunate web.

"TreePirate" refers to the accusations that were aimed at me and the nature of the photo that was at issue.

So, that is the the inspiration for this site. I hope you never have to go through what I did and especially I hope you enjoy my photos and the small window they provide into the beauty of my little corner of Northern California.

-Peter