One of the most recent Internet meme trends has been to launch a site of ridiculous, funny, or awkward photos of things and people that are otherwise found in everyday life. You're probably familiar with some of them: People of Walmart, LATFH, Awkward Family Photos, Regretsy, and so on. Usually these sites become so virally popular that they end up getting book deals, but that's not the case for one such site. Awkward Stock Photos, a site that featured some of the more questionable pictures found in stock photo databases, received a DMCA notice for the contents of its entire site, despite the fact that it removed no watermarks, linked back to the original stock photo page, and made no money off the venture.

Awkward Stock Photos (ASP) was originally born on Facebook as a give-and-take between Mark Hauge and his friends, who encouraged him to start a blog. Once he finally bit the bullet and signed up with Tumblr, ASP became an immediate hit, and Hauge started receiving hundreds of submissions from readers. An Ars reader and graphic designer himself, Hauge was familiar with how finicky some companies can be, so he made sure to try and cover his bases. Or so he thought: "I made sure to only use watermarked photos that I downloaded and re-uploaded to Tumblr (so I wasn't hotlinking) and then linked them back to their original source," he told Ars.

"[I] just thought in general that I would be ok with what I was doing," Hauge said. "After the rise in popularity, I also considered implementing ads, but then decided against it because this was about the hilarious photos and the community around it, not making money."

Hauge added that he even got comments saying that people had bought stock photos from the linked sites as a result of ASP.

It turns out that iStockPhoto, one of the most common sources for material on ASP, didn't like the free advertising, though. It sent a DMCA takedown notice to Tumblr, which passed on the demands to Hauge. This is despite the fact that the characteristic "iStockPhoto" watermark was never removed from any of the entries and they all linked back to the actual photo on iStockPhoto's website. On top of it all, Tumblr insisted that Hauge take down every stock photo on the site—not just those from iStockPhoto—lest Tumblr just shut down the blog altogether.

It's hard to see why iStockPhoto could possibly have any objection to its wares being highlighted somewhere else on the Internet except that it didn't like being called awkward. "If our analytics have anything to say about it, [ASP] has allowed tens of thousands of eyeballs [to] get back to see these artists’ works over the past couple of weeks," Hauge wrote on the site. In his e-mail to Ars, he questioned whether taking a screenshot of his computer with an iStockPhoto being displayed would have been allowed, and pointed out that other popular blogs hosted on Tumblr (notably LATFH) got their start by using photos without the owner's permission, "but they were likely taken from peoples' Facebook and MySpace accounts and not not some corporate website with a team of lawyers."

For now, Hauge has decided to comply with the request to take down all of his offerings and, according to another blog post on the site, it's moving towards text links only in hopes of satisfying iStockPhoto's (and Tumblr's) demands. This, of course, will reduce the fun in browsing such a site—you mean I have to click through!?—and for nothing more than a dubious DMCA claim. After all, it certainly doesn't seem as if anyone's copyrights were being violated and, at least in this instance, the photos were being offered for commentary (one element that could potentially qualify them under Fair Use).

It seems we won't find out whether this would actually be the case, though. At least for the time being, Hauge is cooperating with the request, though he had better hope that iStockPhoto doesn't push back over the text links. It has happened before with a site called BlockShopper that was bullied into settling with a Chicago law firm over text links on its site—if that happens in this case, Hauge may simply decide that a few laughs aren't worth it anymore and close up shop.

(iStockPhoto declined our request to comment on this story.)