6 ms·

An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats

231 points by dwynings 5y ago

agp152 5y ago
Outing the employees involved honestly was pretty petty. The company sending the letter messed up but that’s no reason for a well-known journalist to take a minimum wage worker to town.
- glaucon 5y ago
  They didn't mess up, they're executing their business plan which might be summarised as "find minor infringments of attributions and, instead of asking for said error to be fixed, fire off demand for loot under threat of legal action"
sdoering 5y ago
I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies. In his case these employees conducted themselves in a manner that lend to said outing. To quote Doctorow: "In other words, I only engaged in conduct that your own employees insisted was legitimate." "That said, I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."
- SloopJon 5y ago
  The submission for the previous post didn't get much traction here, so I'm seeing it for the first time. I'm pretty sure that "YYYYYYY" (ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy) is still named later in the post. A few people have commented to the effect that this is a tempest in a teapot, but the phenomenon of copyleft trolling is news to me. It's fundamentally contrary to the spirit of Creative Commons and like-minded licenses, and has a chilling effect on their use. Cory claims that another of Pixsy's clients, Marco Verch, single-handedly shuttered a Dutch charity. I've never paid much attention to the Creative Commons version numbers. I sure will now.
  - ShowalkKama 5y ago
    >ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy you can set 'dom.even.clipboardevents.enabled' to 'false' in about:config if you are on Firefox (/ forks). This should prevent websites from knowing when you copy / paste something.
  - netsharc 5y ago
    So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque... Or, since that legally iffy, they probably have bots that scan for usagr of CC-licensed content, and when they get hits, they ask the content creator if they would like to be their client and get a percentage of the "mugging"...
    - greenyoda 5y ago
      > So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque... Of course they have clients. Only the actual copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement.
      - thrill 5y ago
        Companies have been known to claim copyright and ask for settlement without owning said copyright. I've been targeted like this, for a media piece that's been public domain for over half a century.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  > I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies. Why not? Companies don’t act autonomously. If a company does something, it’s because somewhere along the line a human representing that company either did it directly or set it into motion. I’d agree with you if you were against outing individual employees for honest mistakes (unless they’re particularly negligent; there’s a lot of gray area here). But I’m not really into exculpating people for their misdeeds just because they did them on behalf of a company.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Cases like this make me wonder about "all publicity is good publicity". I don't see a good result from Pixsy from this. But then, I don't know their customer acquisition strategy. "Picking a fight with a vocal, famous, copyrights activist" might be right up there on page 2.
- sdoering 5y ago
  If I read Doctorow correctly he implies that people shelling out content creation and using outdated licenses in the hope of people making attribution mistakes might be their target clientele. These might not be negatively impacted by this behavior.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Yeah, I can see that. It could be all part of the plan
- underwater 5y ago
  I used to hang out on the Photography reddit. They have a couple of commonly shared opinions that just don't sit right with me. The first is that people who don't like being photographed in street photography can kick rocks, because taking and selling pictures of strangers is perfectly legal. The second is that anyone who violates their copyright should be punished severely, even if the other party was naive or made a mistake. Unsurprisingly, they love Pixsy: https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/k9jt7u/1_year_experience_with_pixsy_made_over_30k_so_far/ https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/k9jt7u/1_year_... Personally, I find both of these viewpoints ethically inconsistent and pretty gross. It turned me off both the subreddit and photography as a hobby.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Thankfully the first part is explicitly illegal in France :) You need an authorisation before filming/taking pictures of people, because of image rights ( droit à l'image).
waffle_maniac 5y ago
You can let a mistake go or you can go on a crusade. It does seem like fighting with perceived enemies is good for brand building though. They always need an enemy: big sugar, big tech, big something or other.
- sdoering 5y ago
  So the company should have let the error pass and not answer with additional legal threats? Or should Doctorow just ignored the not so thinly veiled (and wrongly made) threats. Should a journalist not call into question wrong conduct by a company?
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    > I named both the Pixsy employee who threatened me and their supervisor, who apologized but refused to answer my questions about how these threats came to be sent, and whether Pixsy was a company that made a practice out of copyleft trolling. They did apologize and his demands were rejected because, really, it was more like a fishing expedition. He then escalated the situation because he couldn't accept their apology and thought it was part of a wider conspiracy. They responded in kind. So much drama over nothing.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      > They responded in kind? Replying with additional legal threats isn't what I would call "responding in kind". But to quote the original article: "I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."
      - waffle_maniac 5y ago
        Legal threat is a temper tantrum in this case. They are sparring pointlessly.
toyg 5y ago
On one side, we have a company using a shady business model, trying to pick a fight with a notorious internet personality. Sounds like a bad use of their time, but if they were looking for visibility, well, they found it. On the other side, we have an internet personality making a fuss out of trollish email he could safely answer with a single-line reply ("put up or shut up"). Sounds like a bad use of his time, but if he was looking for (renewed) visibility, well, he got it. And then there is me reading about this nonsensical crap. Which was definitely a bad use of my time.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Someone deeply involved in Creative Commons writing about professional copyright trolls abusing it is "nonsensical crap" and a "bad use of time"?
  - toyg 5y ago
    He had already written about it, and it's a lot of noise over nothing - Pixsy are not going to sue him, today or tomorrow. Their continued trolling was effectively begging for this sort of reaction, which they duly obtained. This is the internet equivalent of political talk shows with people shouting at each other: nothing gets done, nothing changes, and it only benefits the shout-heads.
    - philistine 5y ago
      Patent trolls have gotten a tougher time making money because we have kept talking about the problem. See this example here, which refers to the TC Heartland decision, and politicians saying a judge's decision is reprehensible: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/appeals-court-east-texas-cant-keep-patent-case-because-of-one-local-salesman/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/appeals-court-ea... There is such a thing as the court of public opinion, and legal progress is made by talking about debilitating legal crap.
      - toyg 5y ago
        But this isn’t that. This is not even a letter before action. This is just a bunch of inconsequential emails.
iam-TJ 5y ago
Real shame that someone who's own web-site [0] has the strap-line "No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period." publishes on Medium which imposes tracking on readers with no option to opt-out and will not display the simple article text without support of 44 active scripts! [0] https://pluralistic.net/ https://pluralistic.net/
smoyer 5y ago
Wow ... everyone knows that the Doctorow effect is stronger than the Streisand effect. That even fools know better which is a good indication of where Pixsy's organizational intelligence lies.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  He's certainly got his fanbase, but the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days. I kept reading looking for some sort of cohesive, intelligent discussion to be expected from one of internet techs' supposed brightest thinking minds and instead it felt like I was reading a 16 year old's livejournal. They sent me a legal threat! And I told them to go away, and they DID IT AGAIN! Summarizing pages of rambling: corp is trolling people by using old versions of the Creative Commons to go after people for "minor" mistakes in attribution. They keep sending (likely automated) emails to Doctorow. He takes them far too seriously, and instead of just sending them a 'stop wasting my time' letter from his lawyer, he wastes even more time.
  - alar44 5y ago
    > the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days. What a strange take. That "long rant" (is a few paragraphs considered long these days? My goodness) probably took him a whole hour. Who cares how much spare time he has? I'll never understand the internet soap operas people like to get all worked up about.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Copyleft trolling is such a new, and frankly dangerous concept, I for one am glad Cory Doctorow lost a bit of time to this journalistic endeavour. Hurray I say!
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Shots fired, fantastic article. He should seek declaratory relief that he does not owe anything and get 150k from THEM for their error.
nnf 5y ago
I've dealt with companies like this, and they're the absolute worst. The worst thing about getting a legal threat is that you don't know if it's from a real lawyer or is just a shakedown made to look like it's from a lawyer. This usually means having to pay my own lawyer to review the threat and tell me if I need to respond, so even if it's "fake" it costs me time and legal fees.
b3nji 5y ago
There are two sides to every story. I'd prefer to reserve judgment on this until I can clearly see both sides. I feel both sides could be as wrong as each other, both seem quite harsh, and uncalled for. Also, the author describes themselves as an "activist", this sets off alarm bells.
- patal 5y ago
  I know what you mean by those alarm bells. But in that very article: "I also spent a lot of time in Brussels agitating for the passage of the GDPR". If anybody's justified calling themselves activist, surely that's Doctorow. I'm sure you'll find more reasons, if you just search what he actually does, for about 2 minutes.

231 points by dwynings 5y ago

Outing the employees involved honestly was pretty petty. The company sending the letter messed up but that’s no reason for a well-known journalist to take a minimum wage worker to town.

glaucon 5y ago
They didn't mess up, they're executing their business plan which might be summarised as "find minor infringments of attributions and, instead of asking for said error to be fixed, fire off demand for loot under threat of legal action"

sdoering 5y ago

I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies. In his case these employees conducted themselves in a manner that lend to said outing. To quote Doctorow: "In other words, I only engaged in conduct that your own employees insisted was legitimate." "That said, I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."

SloopJon 5y ago
The submission for the previous post didn't get much traction here, so I'm seeing it for the first time. I'm pretty sure that "YYYYYYY" (ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy) is still named later in the post. A few people have commented to the effect that this is a tempest in a teapot, but the phenomenon of copyleft trolling is news to me. It's fundamentally contrary to the spirit of Creative Commons and like-minded licenses, and has a chilling effect on their use. Cory claims that another of Pixsy's clients, Marco Verch, single-handedly shuttered a Dutch charity. I've never paid much attention to the Creative Commons version numbers. I sure will now.
- ShowalkKama 5y ago
  >ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy you can set 'dom.even.clipboardevents.enabled' to 'false' in about:config if you are on Firefox (/ forks). This should prevent websites from knowing when you copy / paste something.
- netsharc 5y ago
  So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque... Or, since that legally iffy, they probably have bots that scan for usagr of CC-licensed content, and when they get hits, they ask the content creator if they would like to be their client and get a percentage of the "mugging"...
  - greenyoda 5y ago
    > So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque... Of course they have clients. Only the actual copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement.
    - thrill 5y ago
      Companies have been known to claim copyright and ask for settlement without owning said copyright. I've been targeted like this, for a media piece that's been public domain for over half a century.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
> I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies. Why not? Companies don’t act autonomously. If a company does something, it’s because somewhere along the line a human representing that company either did it directly or set it into motion. I’d agree with you if you were against outing individual employees for honest mistakes (unless they’re particularly negligent; there’s a lot of gray area here). But I’m not really into exculpating people for their misdeeds just because they did them on behalf of a company.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Cases like this make me wonder about "all publicity is good publicity". I don't see a good result from Pixsy from this. But then, I don't know their customer acquisition strategy. "Picking a fight with a vocal, famous, copyrights activist" might be right up there on page 2.

sdoering 5y ago
If I read Doctorow correctly he implies that people shelling out content creation and using outdated licenses in the hope of people making attribution mistakes might be their target clientele. These might not be negatively impacted by this behavior.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Yeah, I can see that. It could be all part of the plan
underwater 5y ago
I used to hang out on the Photography reddit. They have a couple of commonly shared opinions that just don't sit right with me. The first is that people who don't like being photographed in street photography can kick rocks, because taking and selling pictures of strangers is perfectly legal. The second is that anyone who violates their copyright should be punished severely, even if the other party was naive or made a mistake. Unsurprisingly, they love Pixsy: https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/k9jt7u/1_year_experience_with_pixsy_made_over_30k_so_far/ https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/k9jt7u/1_year_... Personally, I find both of these viewpoints ethically inconsistent and pretty gross. It turned me off both the subreddit and photography as a hobby.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Thankfully the first part is explicitly illegal in France :) You need an authorisation before filming/taking pictures of people, because of image rights ( droit à l'image).

waffle_maniac 5y ago

You can let a mistake go or you can go on a crusade. It does seem like fighting with perceived enemies is good for brand building though. They always need an enemy: big sugar, big tech, big something or other.

sdoering 5y ago
So the company should have let the error pass and not answer with additional legal threats? Or should Doctorow just ignored the not so thinly veiled (and wrongly made) threats. Should a journalist not call into question wrong conduct by a company?
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  > I named both the Pixsy employee who threatened me and their supervisor, who apologized but refused to answer my questions about how these threats came to be sent, and whether Pixsy was a company that made a practice out of copyleft trolling. They did apologize and his demands were rejected because, really, it was more like a fishing expedition. He then escalated the situation because he couldn't accept their apology and thought it was part of a wider conspiracy. They responded in kind. So much drama over nothing.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    > They responded in kind? Replying with additional legal threats isn't what I would call "responding in kind". But to quote the original article: "I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."
    - waffle_maniac 5y ago
      Legal threat is a temper tantrum in this case. They are sparring pointlessly.

toyg 5y ago

On one side, we have a company using a shady business model, trying to pick a fight with a notorious internet personality. Sounds like a bad use of their time, but if they were looking for visibility, well, they found it. On the other side, we have an internet personality making a fuss out of trollish email he could safely answer with a single-line reply ("put up or shut up"). Sounds like a bad use of his time, but if he was looking for (renewed) visibility, well, he got it. And then there is me reading about this nonsensical crap. Which was definitely a bad use of my time.

stefan_ 5y ago
Someone deeply involved in Creative Commons writing about professional copyright trolls abusing it is "nonsensical crap" and a "bad use of time"?
- toyg 5y ago
  He had already written about it, and it's a lot of noise over nothing - Pixsy are not going to sue him, today or tomorrow. Their continued trolling was effectively begging for this sort of reaction, which they duly obtained. This is the internet equivalent of political talk shows with people shouting at each other: nothing gets done, nothing changes, and it only benefits the shout-heads.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Patent trolls have gotten a tougher time making money because we have kept talking about the problem. See this example here, which refers to the TC Heartland decision, and politicians saying a judge's decision is reprehensible: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/appeals-court-east-texas-cant-keep-patent-case-because-of-one-local-salesman/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/appeals-court-ea... There is such a thing as the court of public opinion, and legal progress is made by talking about debilitating legal crap.
    - toyg 5y ago
      But this isn’t that. This is not even a letter before action. This is just a bunch of inconsequential emails.

iam-TJ 5y ago

Real shame that someone who's own web-site [0] has the strap-line "No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period." publishes on Medium which imposes tracking on readers with no option to opt-out and will not display the simple article text without support of 44 active scripts! [0] https://pluralistic.net/ https://pluralistic.net/

smoyer 5y ago

Wow ... everyone knows that the Doctorow effect is stronger than the Streisand effect. That even fools know better which is a good indication of where Pixsy's organizational intelligence lies.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
He's certainly got his fanbase, but the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days. I kept reading looking for some sort of cohesive, intelligent discussion to be expected from one of internet techs' supposed brightest thinking minds and instead it felt like I was reading a 16 year old's livejournal. They sent me a legal threat! And I told them to go away, and they DID IT AGAIN! Summarizing pages of rambling: corp is trolling people by using old versions of the Creative Commons to go after people for "minor" mistakes in attribution. They keep sending (likely automated) emails to Doctorow. He takes them far too seriously, and instead of just sending them a 'stop wasting my time' letter from his lawyer, he wastes even more time.
- alar44 5y ago
  > the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days. What a strange take. That "long rant" (is a few paragraphs considered long these days? My goodness) probably took him a whole hour. Who cares how much spare time he has? I'll never understand the internet soap operas people like to get all worked up about.
- philistine 5y ago
  Copyleft trolling is such a new, and frankly dangerous concept, I for one am glad Cory Doctorow lost a bit of time to this journalistic endeavour. Hurray I say!

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Shots fired, fantastic article. He should seek declaratory relief that he does not owe anything and get 150k from THEM for their error.

nnf 5y ago

I've dealt with companies like this, and they're the absolute worst. The worst thing about getting a legal threat is that you don't know if it's from a real lawyer or is just a shakedown made to look like it's from a lawyer. This usually means having to pay my own lawyer to review the threat and tell me if I need to respond, so even if it's "fake" it costs me time and legal fees.

b3nji 5y ago

There are two sides to every story. I'd prefer to reserve judgment on this until I can clearly see both sides. I feel both sides could be as wrong as each other, both seem quite harsh, and uncalled for. Also, the author describes themselves as an "activist", this sets off alarm bells.

patal 5y ago
I know what you mean by those alarm bells. But in that very article: "I also spent a lot of time in Brussels agitating for the passage of the GDPR". If anybody's justified calling themselves activist, surely that's Doctorow. I'm sure you'll find more reasons, if you just search what he actually does, for about 2 minutes.