That's all folks

30 November, 2024

As per the below announcement, Infringement.Report is now closed. The process of decommissioning the service has begun and we no longer have access to your data.

26 October, 2024
After a lot of thought and procrastination, I've decided that it is time to close Infringement.Report. The system will remain operational until the end of November.

You may feel a hint of deja vu: Towards the end of last year, Infringement.Report experienced a major outage - at that time I thought there was no choice but to close the business, however I eventually managed to get things working again and went back to business as usual. What I didn't share at that time was that I had started another business which was taking up a lot of my time and energy. We're now 18 months into that business and it is far more successful than Infringement.Report ever was. I regret that I haven't had any time to put into Infringement.Report this year - even to the point where it has taken me weeks to respond to basic queries, or when none of the subscriptions got charged at the beginning of this month, I didn't have the time to investigate. It's not sustainable for me to keep Infringement.Report running.

What's next:

• The system is currently operational.
• Unless you tell me otherwise, you will get charged for your subscription as usual at the beginning of November - if you were not charged this month, you will be charged the full amount for the period from the start of your October billing cycle until the end of November.
• I'll start to wind things down at the end of November. If you would like to download any data from the service, please do so as soon as possible. While I want you to have the chance to download anything that you need, operational costs and our subscription agreement limit how long I can retain customer data.

Because we're talking about copyright material that does not belong to me, and sensitive data, I want to be explicit about the next steps:

• Account access: After November 31, 2024 your agreement with Infringement.Report will be terminated and you won't be able to log into your account.
• Data deletion: I'll begin wiping all images and data from our servers starting December 1st. This includes all backups and logs.
• Your personal info: All personal data that is held about you (name, email address, address, credit card info) will be deleted from relevant systems. We won't keep a list of who you are, and won't email you about anything else.

Should you prefer to cancel immediately, want an earlier data deletion date, or have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

I understand this news may be disappointing, and I truly appreciate the trust and support you've placed in Infringement.Report over the years. If there's anything I can do to make this transition smoother for you, just let me know.

Answers to other questions

• Is Infringement.Report for sale? The business is not for sale but the technology can be licensed. I've been around in circles with several buyers over the past two years, and it won't work: the codebase is 10 years old/mostly spaghetti; I have no time to support a buyer in onboarding; there is major platform risk; and the largest customers have already been notified/are already migrating away: there is very little value for me or a buyer. I prefer a clean break from most of the cruft that has accumulated over the years. However, the core crawler technology can be licensed and is relatively modern compared to the rest of the codebase - get in touch for more information.
• What are the next best services? It has been years since I have seriously looked, but the normal answers I give are Google Vision API (WebDetection), Bing Visual Search API (pagesIncluding), or one of the many scraping services (which aren't quite as good or as cheap as Infringement.Report) that you will find by searching for "google reverse image search api".

Cheers,
Alec