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A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
- woliveirajr 3y agoClever. Since not obeying some item of a CC license implies that you're not covered by such license, "bad guys" might induce someone to infringe the CC and then violate the copyright
- yau8edq12i 3y agoThat is indeed the point that the article makes.
- b112 3y agoSeems a weird thing to level at CC licensing. You could entrap via a million different things, such scams are as old as the hills.
- blowski 3y agoAnd yet. Why invent new scummy ways of making money if the old ones still work?
- noirscape 3y agoWell in this case, Doctorow is one of the drafters of the CC license, so he's effectively criticizing what he sees as an abuse of his own creation here. Which he is rightfully doing - CC4.0 adds the "forced grace period" you find in a lot of other licenses, where there's basically a period of time between being in breach of the license and when the license gets revoked. Usually the way thats defined is that you have something like 30 days to "cure" the mistake once you're notified. Only after those 30 days do you lose the rights granted by the license itself. It specifically exists to avoid this kind of copyright trolling, where a lawyer uses the complicated demands in the text of the license to make a mess of the intent behind it. The actual viability of that type of trolling is questionable (German courts threw it out for example), but the threat of legal fees can be too costly for most so it works as an extortion mechanism. (The main notable variant of this is in pre-3.0 versions of the GPL, where the 30 days would start the moment you breached the license rather than being notified. 3.0 fixed that and I've seen people who prefer GPL2.0 often modify this term in specific to be more like GPL3.0 so they can avoid the headache.)
- notpushkin 3y agoSee also: GPL Cooperation Commitment https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/ https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/
- htyden 3y agoAlternative location: https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-c...
- MaxBarraclough 3y agoThanks, that's much better than Medium.
- pxeger1 3y agoTalk about burying the lede: > The original version of the CC license stated that the license would “terminate automatically upon any breach.” That meant that if you failed to live up to the license terms in any substantial way, you were no longer a licensed user of the copyrighted work. Any uses you had made of that work were no longer permitted under the license, so unless you had another basis for using it (for example, if your use qualified as “fair use”), then you were now infringing copyright. Recall that “willful” copyright infringement carries a statutory penalty of $150,000. [Copyleft trolls say:] we’ll find people who made minor errors in their use of your Creative Commons works, and then send them a speculative invoice for a “license,” on threat of a copyright lawsuit that could run them $150 grand plus legal fees.
- orlp 3y agoHas it ever been successfully argued in a court of law that forgetting a minor detail of the CC license counts as "willfully infringement"?
- Tomte 3y agoThere have been rulings in Germany (I can find only one), that minor omissions when generally crediting the photographer, do not lead to damages: https://sos-recht.de/abmahnung/news/kein-schadensersatz-veroeffentlichung-cc-lizenz-fotos-ohne-namensnennung/ https://sos-recht.de/abmahnung/news/kein-schadensersatz-vero...
- b112 3y agoAn invalidated license may not be that, I don't know, but once the license is clearly terminated, any use of that work would then be wilful. So if you have a bluray movie for sale, you'd have to pull copies, and reissue edited without the image. Art would have to be taken off the walls. Logos rebranded. Otherwise it would be wilful. And I believe it is per infringement?
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThis often doesn't matter. What they're looking for is something to sue you for that isn't so blatantly absurd it would get their lawyers disbarred for making the claim, not something they can necessarily win on the merits. Then they go to you and say hey, it'll cost you this many thousand dollars to hire a lawyer and defend against this lawsuit in court -- even if you win. Or, you can just pay a fraction of that right now and it will all go away.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago[flagged]
- mgaunard 3y agoI hate articles that go on and on about some story before finally explaining what's in the title.
- MalphasWats 3y agoYou're complaining about a Writer writing?
- mgaunard 3y agoI'm complaining about clickbait.
- croes 3y agoIf the article fits the title and isn't just to draw clicks it's not clickbait. To be overly verbose is neither.
- KingMob 3y agoA light introduction that then segues into background material on a complicated legal topic is not clickbait.
- remram 3y ago> The first three versions of the Creative Commons license contained a small, significant oversight This sentence is 1087 words in. That's a long "light introduction".
- KingMob 3y agoYou're lumping in the long background section with the introduction.
- mgaunard 3y agoThe actual content I would expect is the following 3 points. 1. What the old clause of the license was 2. What kind of unintended side effect it had 3. What the new clause addressing this is Summing up those 3 points results in a clear paragraph of maybe 5 to 10 lines. Meanwhile I challenge anyone who hasn't read it to extract that content from the article in less than 15 minutes.
- Karliss 3y agoI wonder does making a minor mistake in attribution really count as "wilful infringement"? As a layman, I would expect that any reasonable attempts to comply with license requirements should indicate that infringement was accidental. Sure, if it's a large company whose legal advisor instructs do x to avoid maximum penalty, with intention to infringe the copyright, that should probably still count as wilful infringement.
- toyg 3y agoSpirit-of-the-law practice means most honest judges would quickly throw out this sort of technicality-based argument, particularly in the anglosphere. Sadly, depending on the specific country it happens in, a defendant might still have to pay significant legal fees just to reach a point where the judge can tell trolls to go away. And that's where the business model kicks in: the trolls will offer to go away on their own if defendant pays them $LikelyLegalFees / 2, making it cheaper than the alternative. It's like the Kevin Bridges bus-stop joke: https://youtu.be/8W_k7ybGBDg https://youtu.be/8W_k7ybGBDg
- EasyMark 3y agoTHe US Federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals would like to have a word with you. Particularly the past decade or so they have been truly awful when considering cases; ignoring precedence, common sense, democracy, and practicality whenever possible.
- arcastroe 3y agoThe original email sent from Pixsy contained the following text, which the author ignored by publishing the email in entirety. > PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. This e-mail, its contents, and attachments are private and confidential and is intended for the recipient only. Any disclosure, copying or unauthorized use of such information is prohibited. Can someone with knowledge comment on this practice? Are these just empty words? Or is it legally enforceable to send an email and forbid "copying" or publishing/disclosing the contents?
- colde 3y agoThat likely depends on where you are and what the content actually is. In Denmark where i am located, it would definitely not apply in most cases. Of course, if you are a lawyer communicating with your client it would be protected, but that would be the case even without the disclaimer.
- reaperman 3y ago> Are these just empty words? Yes. Without some kind of existing contract in place, they're meaningless. > Or is it legally enforceable to send an email and forbid "copying" or publishing/disclosing the contents? Only in extremely rare circumstances. It can be legally useful to put a note saying "Hey, this email contains trade secrets. If it was accidentally sent to you, you might want to think twice about further disseminating or selling these trade secrets." But the case law on this is quite weak, and putting the disclaimer on every email even if they don't contain trade secrets may be counter-productive by diluting the claim even in cases where it actually would apply. It's debatable but many legal scholars would assume similarly for a disclaimer on every single email saying "This is attorney-client privileged." unless maybe your business is a law firm.
- jasonjayr 3y agoIn the USA, this law exists for physical mail: https://about.usps.com/publications/pub300a/pub300a_v04_revision_072019_tech_021.htm https://about.usps.com/publications/pub300a/pub300a_v04_revi... I'm not sure that it has been applied to email, but that would make for some very interesting cases. (Is Intellectual Property merchandise? Rights assigned to the content of the message?)
- labster 3y ago(2022) It’s been two years since this was published, has it become a widespread problem? I haven’t heard about copyleft trolls before so perhaps not?
- est 3y agoand most importantly, has CC corrected that bug?
- trashburger 3y agoAccording to TFA, upgrading to CC 4.0 closes this loophole.
- klez 3y ago> It’s been two years since this was published And so many links are already dead. Linkrot is so quick sometimes.
- mgaunard 3y ago[flagged]
- inglor_cz 3y ago"Big whoop. If you can't even satisfy such simple terms, it's your own fault." Banal mistakes shouldn't destroy people. Imagine if a slightly incorrect use of a light switch gave you an electric shock, or a slightly incorrect use of an OTC medication (10 minutes after a meal instead of 10 minutes before a meal) would kill you. You and all your loved ones would have been long dead. Big whoop. If you can't even satisfy such simple terms, it's your own fault.
- mgaunard 3y agoBeing open to litigation does not destroy you. Also a contract is serious business.
- dzaima 3y agoUnfortunately, saying "contract is serious business" helps nobody. Much as it would be nice to not have to encounter any contracts (or even just not obscenely many) in the modern world, that is just largely not impossible, so people have to deal with it somehow, and it would be nice if that doesn't include random $150000 fines. I can see an argument for the copyright trolls on it being wilful infringement if there was some attribution but not all of it - clearly the infringer is aware that there must be attribution otherwise there wouldn't be any, but they still ended up infringing; of course a court could still decide either way, but most sane people without millions of disposable money wouldn't risk the $150k if they can pay a couple thousand and be done with it; and either of those can still destroy a person.
- mgaunard 3y agoYou don't really expose yourself to such copyright infringement unless you redistribute somebody else's work. If you're gonna do that, you better make sure you're allowed to and under what conditions.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 3y agoPhotography in particular is frustratingly easy to get wrong. Even if someone tries to be careful, there are a number of conditions that I'm guessing aren't met to the letter a lot of the time. Furthermore, when things like presentation slides are being reused and modified, attributions get separated from photographs all the time. Finally that doesn't even get into CC-non-commercial which no one can agree what it means and that Creative Commons itself punted on defining in the latest license iteration.
- wolrah 3y ago> Photography in particular is frustratingly easy to get wrong. Not directly relevant but this reminded me of an article I probably saw linked here a few years ago where two photographers took nearly identical photos and people on the internet accused both of them of stealing the other's work. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/7338941576/how-two-photographers-captured-the-same-millisecond-in-time https://www.dpreview.com/articles/7338941576/how-two-photogr...
- ghaff 3y agoI think I may have seen that at the time. In terms of writing, someone I know was mildly miffed years back that I had taken an observation from one of his columns and used it for my own. A mutual acquaintance pointed out that my column had actually appeared first :-)
- a_gnostic 3y agoI'm a fan of the old BIPCOT (1) Licence. Let's see them discuss that in a ministerial setting… 1. https://bipcot.org/ https://bipcot.org/
- elicksaur 3y agoThe Pixsy website pretty clearly gives a California address as a business location. Was this info sent to the CA Bar? If an attorney is really not involved, that could be practicing law without a license.
- prerok 3y agoYeah, "XXXXX and YYYYY have also abused our trust. Terribly sorry for the inconvenience." Snark aside, I fully agree, the company should be held accountable. I just don't know how much if they just "sent an email". I mean, this is gross :(
- xbar 3y agoA "bug" is a very generous term for how severely punitive CC 1.x, 2.x and 3.x were. It was flatly bad and wrong and did exactly the opposite of what it was promised to do--permit rights holders to let users share their work and attribute it. It tricked people into a legal trap of minutiae and put users at risk. It was broken for nearly two decades.
- lolc 3y agoYes "error" or "mistake" fits better than "bug". That's a general problem with the term though.
- dylan604 3y agoI originally thought bug was a strange term, but I could see how/why it might have been chosen. An error or mistake that results in incorrect/undesired/unforeseen results not caught by the compiler. s/compiler/(lawyer|judge)/
- prerok 3y agoI actually find "bug" to be the most apt name for it. Their intent was to enable a feature, therefore writing it this way was not an error: it, however, did not take into account all the side-effects. They did err on the side of caution, to protect the contributor, but when doing so, they did not take into account that it might be abused as well. Just my two cents.
- dylan604 3y agoAt what point do you differentiate a bug from a design flaw? This reads like different devs were provided conflicting requirements that had no discussion between devs. It wasn't until after the branches were merged that the problem existed as the unit tests from each dev worked as expected.
- ghaff 3y ago> minutiae This is sort of my general issue with Creative Commons. First, it's not just about attribution as the term would be understood in many other contexts. And then you have the Chinese menu of no-commercial and no-derivatives to encourage people who might otherwise hesitate to use CC to do so. But then those terms are ill-defined and people widely disagree on them.
- mannykannot 3y agoThe first notice Cory received claimed to be a second notice, and he assumes he missed the first one, but I'm wondering if this was deliberate mischaracterization (by the sender) of what was actually a first notice, either in an attempt to establish that the recipient was willfully continuing the violation after a first notice, or in an attempt to induce the recipient to come to this conclusion themselves. For all I know, the law has effective sanctions against this practice, but I imagine there are ways of sending a first notice in a way that make it unlikely to be received - a typo in the address, or perhaps an email crafted so as to likely be classified as spam.
- kmeisthax 3y ago"This is the second notice that your car warranty has expired" but more threatening
- CraigRo 3y agoClearly the next thing is to robosign grievances against lawyers.
- AlienRobot 3y agoOne thing I wonder about CC is whether you have to include attribution and license in the same page the work is embedded. It's common sense that this would be the case, but in Wikipedia, for example, CC works don't actually have attribution in the page they're shown, you have to click on them to see the attribution. I wish this was clarified. Like, why is Wikipedia allowed to do this? Is it because they're thumbnails?
- datadrivenangel 3y ago"Another bunch went even further: they uploaded gay porn to the Pirate Bay, but labeled it as if it were top-40 music collections, then demanded huge payouts in exchange for not filing lawsuits that would permanently link their victims’ names with extremely explicit gay porn video titles in online searches." Wow this is such an amazing and unethical scam. What do you do in a situation like this?
- sandworm101 3y ago>> What do you do in a situation like this? Make sure that when you are downloading or uploading anything, and I mean anything from the internet that you do it though VPNs or other services that place some barrier between you and copyright trolls. You don't need NSA-levels of security to avoid the trolls, just enough of a barrier that their automated tools cannot see you so easily. If you run a website, generate all your own content. Don't use stock photos. FYI, film and TV have been dealing with the same issue for decades. It is normal on a film/TV set for there to be zero tolerance for anything that might be subject to copyright. Any painting on a wall will either be blurred or the film will commission a new painting. That is a healthy policy for any website: if you want a little drawing of a mouse, pay someone to create one for you. Don't pay 5$ for a stock image that may or may not be appropriately licensed.
- jstarfish 3y agoYou missed the actual threat. Troll files bad faith lawsuit on behalf of Falcon Ltd. claiming S. Andworm infringed upon their copyright on multiple gay porn titles uploaded to TorrentSite. This stuff gets picked up by sites scraping dockets and resold as "background check" services. You are now falsely associated with this content in an authoritative context. The suit will obviously fail but until then people will see a lawsuit was filed against you and by who. The scam works because nobody questions the legitimacy or sees it through to resolution. "Fake and gay" has never described something so aptly. There isn't much you can do about bad faith claims. Claimants either face no consequence for false reporting or are able to plausibly deny it.
- peteradio 3y ago
- chmod775 3y ago> However, Titan Media’s lawyer Gill Sperlein told TorrentFreak that this is absolutely not the case. > “This is not a scheme to make money. My clients are hurt immensely by copyright infringement and they are not going to make it worse by actually distributing their works on these networks,” he told us. Yeah. Right. I guess mysterious strangers keep uploading that porn disguised as something else for no good reason. How did they find it themselves if it is mislabeled? Even if they didn't upload it themselves, going after people who clearly did not mean to download gay porn and trying to shame them into submission is absolutely despicable leech-like behavior deserving of every bit of contempt. I do not understand how these people are able to exist in society. If it was my own father doing that, we'd have a falling out.
- chmod775 3y agoForgot some context: I was commenting on a torrentfreak article (2011) that is linked in this article. https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/ https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pi...
- Groxx 3y agoSo... I'm somewhere between "yes obviously CC is intending to facilitate reuse" and "yes obviously people who choose it often do so because they see others choosing it and don't read the fine details" and also "the majority of uses are probably acceptable by the creators"... ... and: if you wanted to just allow reuse we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain. CC requires attribution. That means it requires attribution. Among other things. That is arguably the main point of CC over Public Domain. So this is kinda working as intended? There are obviously literal malicious trolls (manipulative, or following the law but intentionally targeting the most vulnerable rather than the main violators), but the amount of companies flagrantly violating these licenses is extreme and I don't feel any sympathy for them. Grabbing images off Google without researching their license is a fast track to getting sued, and it should be. That's the crux of any "don't steal from artists" and "exposure is not payment" argument.
- ghaff 3y agoThe thing is that attribution as the term is normally used is insufficient. As Cory notes, all the CC licenses, except for CC0, actually require: Name the creator (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Provide a URL for the work (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Name the license Provide a URL for the license Note whether the work has been modified So a very normal photo credit like "CC photo by John Smith" is actually not appropriate Creative Commons attribution.
- Groxx 3y agoWhich goes right back to "yes, but...". There's an enormous pattern of "it's okay to use X if I say it's not mine" both individually and commercially and it's not okay. The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. Commercial entities that don't hard-require every image posted to their blog to be either new or come from e.g. Getty are willingly playing fast and loose and hoping they don't get sued. Not-for-profit individuals (e.g. personal blog posts) making an attempt at attribution: yeah I think the vast majority are entirely fine with that, but would lightly prefer accurate attribution, and targeting them is a troll act. Is that a majority of violators and CC creators? ... I don't know. Possibly? Should trolls be targeting them? Heck no. Does the 30 day grace period allow companies to willingly violate this and only fix it after they've made their profit and have nothing to lose, and the creator nothing to gain? Yes absolutely. If you actually don't care about attribution, distribute under Public Domain and ask for attribution when you think it's worthwhile. Many will likely say yes - I've seen loads of public domain images used with attribution. People like public domain contributions. If you do care, legal teeth are kinda required, and choosing CC means explicitly choosing legal teeth.
- zengid 3y agoTIL that Hal Abelson, nerd-famous for the programming book _Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs_ (SICP), was involved in creating Creative Commons. Amazing achievements!
- hbrav 3y agoA lawyer I know once pointed out that a good first step one receipt of anything like this is to reply with "Please provide me with the full name and address of your counsel so I may know to whom I should address subsequent correspondence." If you do not receive an answer, you are not dealing with someone who is serious about taking you to court. If you do receive an answer, you should immediately check whether that person is actually licensed to practice law (you can usually check online). If not, report to the relevant bar association that [name] is presenting themselves as licensed to practice law (don't be spooky, send the full details to the bar association). Only if you are put in contact with an actual lawyer should you waste any energy thinking about this further.
- mhuffman 3y ago>"Please provide me with the full name and address of your counsel so I may know to whom I should address subsequent correspondence." >If not, report to the relevant bar association that [name] is presenting themselves as licensed to practice law (don't be spooky, send the full details to the bar association). In the US, at least, are people not allowed to represent themselves as their own counsel?
- malcolmgreaves 3y agoIn the US, you cannot say that you are an attorney if you are not actually an attorney. Doing so is a crime: fraud. This is important, because if you're paying money to someone to be your attorney, it's important that they actually know what they're doing :) In the US, to be an attorney, one needs to pass the state's bar in the relevant area of law that one would practice. > In the US, at least, are people not allowed to represent themselves as their own counsel? Sure they can. But they can't say "I'm an attorney." That's what OP is getting at. For more context -- In the US, anyone can sue anyone for any reason. However, that doesn't mean it's going to be a valid or even successful suit. Except in small claims court, representing yourself in a legal situation is an absolutely terrible idea. Not only will you most certainly loose the suit for not following the proper legal procedures (pesky things like having an actual legal argument, presenting valid evidence, citing relevant laws and case precedents, understanding the opposing counsel's legal argument, evidence, citations, etc.) you could easily get yourself into a situation where you'd be wasting so much time and resources by fucking up that you could be slapped with a fine yourself! Or, let's say you're in court, have no idea what you're doing, and get so frustrated you start becoming unreasonable -- contempt of court, put into jail until you calm down. tl;dr You can't say you're an attorney if you're not one, that's a crime (fraud). If you interact with the legal system without an attorney, you're going to get screwed. :)
- atomicfiredoll 3y agoFor anybody that didn't read the whole article, I'll point attention to this section at the end: "It could get much, much worse. Rightsholder groups are backing a Copyright Office plan to make this kind of robosigning into law, forcing all online platforms to institute filters that automatically remove materials that an algorithm finds to be infringing, without human oversight or judgement." Here's a link to that document in the Federal Register [0]. Public comments apparently closed on Feb. 8th, but it may be worth keeping an eye on. [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/22/2021-27705/technical-measures-public-consultations https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/22/2021-27...
- labster 3y agoComments closed over two years ago on that link. But yes, every couple of years people ask the Library of Congress to change copyright enforcement, so the battle of rule making never really ends.
- melagonster 3y ago>Like, I’ve repeated emailed the contact address for “Fintech Zoom” to request that they fix the attribution on this photo and all I get is crickets.