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Since I've been victim of this practice, let me elaborate: There are individuals in Germany (two photographers IIRC) who upload photos to the Wikipedia. The li
by dna_polymerase 6y ago
Since I've been victim of this practice, let me elaborate:
There are individuals in Germany (two photographers IIRC) who upload photos to the Wikipedia. The licence is always CC with attribution, but that part is badly presented on Wiki (or was). Next thing, they wait for people to use their images and go around to sue everyone who doesn't display the attribution string alongside the image. It is just predatory behavior. They guy sent me an E-Mail with an pay early option. Their claims are also this weak, that the guy trying to pull this off with me was instantly silenced after our lawyer sent him a single letter.
- zucker42 6y agoHmm, the text of the Creative Commons license is such that I would think such suits would be unsuccessful in court. Specifically, it has a section about reinstating your rights if you fix a violation of the license after you are notified. Has this ever been litigated? Of course receiving a demand letter is still a nuisance. If this is a problem that you have knowledge about, have you ever considered contacting Creative Commons about this? They could perhaps provide legal guidance or even modify the next version of the license (if there is a next version).
- growt 6y agoI actually was sued over this exact thing and lost (and paid quite a bit of money). All for a little UI experiment that nobody saw but me, google and (via google image search) these vultures.
- zucker42 6y agoWow really, that's a pretty big problem. Which country?
- growt 6y agoGermany
- draugadrotten 6y agoSo you were copying somebody else's work for free, without even giving them the attribution they ask for as- and THEY are the vultures?
- growt 6y agoRead the grand parent comment for the practice I was referring to. Or are you just trolling?
- dang 6y agoPlease do not break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how bad another comment was. It only makes things even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- growt 6y agoSorry for breaking the snarky-rule. I guess I'm still too touchy about that issue. Also: Big thank you to you and the other mods for keeping this place civil!
- dang 6y agoPlease do not post in the flamewar style to HN. It's against everything we're trying for here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yesenadam 6y agoPlease consider writing up the story and submitting as an HN post, that sounds horrific. Thanks.
- growt 6y agoI don't know if my writeup would add something new. It's actually a known practice here in germany (as I discovered after the fact). Here is a good article about it (in german and not the same photographer as in my case): https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Wikipedia-beraet-ueber-Distanzierung-von-Fotolizenz-Abzockern-3630842.html?seite=all https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Wikipedia-beraet-ueber-Dist...
- growt 6y agoAnd Wikipedia doesn't want to change the missing attribution and "hidden" license for their images. I guess some of those participating in that scheme are active wikipedians and lobbying to keep things as they are.
- Igelau 6y ago> The licence ... is badly presented on Wiki Maybe don't pull images from Wikipedia for exactly this reason?
- dna_polymerase 6y agoI'm all for attribution in this case it was basically user generated content. We deployed measures to avoid this in the future afterwards, nonetheless I still think the practice is predatory. If I had ripped some artist off his hard work, sure. But not naming the photographer of an half-assed picture submitted to an article with close to zero traffic, in order to lure some people into copying the picture for your own profit is just shady.