4 ms·

Clever. 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

Clever. 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 ago
That is indeed the point that the article makes.
- b112 3y ago
  Seems 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 ago
    And yet. Why invent new scummy ways of making money if the old ones still work?
  - noirscape 3y ago
    Well 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 ago
      See also: GPL Cooperation Commitment https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/ https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/

Clever. 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 ago

That is indeed the point that the article makes.

b112 3y ago
Seems 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 ago
  And yet. Why invent new scummy ways of making money if the old ones still work?
- noirscape 3y ago
  Well 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 ago
    See also: GPL Cooperation Commitment https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/ https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/