Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read my @Medium column "A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator," describing my bizarre run-in with a group of #CopyleftTrolls who tried to shake me down for $600.

doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early… 1/

If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/01/31/hee… 2/

What's a #copyleft troll, you ask? 3/

Well, in many ways, they're like #CopyrightTrolls: sleazy operators who hunt for trivially infringing uses of their clients' works and threaten statutory damages suits for $150,000 unless the victim pays for a "license" of anywhere from $250 to $10,000. 4/

But copyleft trolls are, if anything, even sleazier, because they target *non-infringing* uses of copyrighted works that have been released under early versions of @CreativeCommons licenses. 5/

These early licenses all shared a minor oversight: they "terminat[ed] automatically upon any breach."

That meant that if you violated the license terms in any way, you were no longer allowed to post or use the work. 6/

That may sound reasonable, but in the hands of copyleft trolls, it's anything but. They seek out minor defects in users' attribution of Creative Commons works - for example, if you forget to give the URL of the license in your credit to the original. 7/

These aren't copyright infringements, they're minor administrative oversights. Any good-faith use of Creative Commons license would respond to these errors with requests for correction, not legal threats. 8/

Indeed, the current versions of the CC licenses *require* this, giving users a mandatory 30 day period to respond to requests for correction. 9/

But copyleft trolls don't use the current version. Instead, they favor the CC 2.0 licenses, which were superceded in 2007 (!), and which have the strictest attribution requirements. 10/

Copyleft trolls use this strictness to spring a trap on unsuspecting users and real multimillion-dollar paydays.

For example, Larry Philpot is a country music photographer whose side-hustle is copyleft trolling (not my characterization - that's what federal judges call him). 11/

Philpot uploads photos of performers to Wikimedia Commons under CC 2.0 licenses with a specific attribution requirement. Users who fail to see this fine print get hit by "speculative invoices" demanding "license payments." 12/

Philpot came on my radar when he shook down @MetaBrainz, the charity whose board I've been volunteering on for 15 years (we beat him). 13/

But Philpot's trolling pales in comparison to Marco Verch. Verch has a largely automated process that commissions cheap photo-illustrations from photographers in poor countries via Upwork based on each day's CNN headlines. 14/

His Upwork terms require these photographers to assign their copyright to Verch, and he then releases them as CC 2.0 works and waits for naive users to grab them and make a small attribution error, then he sends them a legal demand. 15/

Verch claims he makes millions this way, and only has to work four hours per week to sustain it. He says that copyleft trolling has freed him to pursue his hobby, running. Verch's trolling has killed at least one small charity, a Dutch group that couldn't afford his demands. 16/

Last November, I published an article that I illustrated with a CC 2.0 Attribution licensed photo by a @Flickr user named Nenad Stojkovic. I correctly attributed that image to him on Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, Medium, and on my Wordpress blog.

pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tin… 17/

So imagine my surprise when I got repeated legal threats from @PixsyHQ, a company that bills itself as a defender of photographers' copyrights, demanding that I pay a $600 "license fee" that I clearly didn't owe. 18/

Pixsy sent the email to me with a line indicating they thought I lived in Canada and addressed their correspondence to "Colin," not "Cory." 19/

These may seem like petty errors (I haven't lived in Canada since the previous millennium), but they are *precisely* the kinds of errors Pixsy maintains should produce massive liabilities in others - $150,000 statutory damages awards! 20/

Pixsy raises all kinds of red flags. Not only are they monumentally sloppy, but their reps do not sign their legal threats with their full names, and in their correspondence, they strongly implied that they send these threats without any legal review. 21/

This is completely unethical and is not standard practice. It is the kind of thing that bar associations threaten their members' licenses over. 22/

Pixsy refused to answer any of my questions about the matter, but after I published my article, Pixsy posted a single, ominous tweet seeking to discredit me.

https://twitter.com/PixsyHQ/status/1485961962144124939

23/

This is pretty appalling behavior that indicates an utter lack of contrition or sense of fairness. 24/

By contrast, I made a point of seeking out and citing people who use Pixsy's service for legitimate copyright enforcement, doing my best to represent the company's perspective even though they refused to discuss the matter with me. 25/

(Fun fact: Pixsy has represented Marco Verch in dozens of US lawsuits)

The good news is, Pixsy's copyleft trolling business's days are numbered. Sites like Wikimedia Commons are wising up to copyleft trolls and embedding attribution right in their photos: 26/

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luda…

Flickr is updating its service - which was horribly neglected by the previous owners, Yahoo and Verizon - with updated licenses, one-click attribution strings and warnings on images with out-of date licenses. 27/

Creative Commons is also rolling out a host of anti-trolling measures, including this excellent "Principles for License Enforcement" white-paper.

creativecommons.org/2021/12/08/pri…

And @WPOpenverse, the CC search tool, has added one-click attributions. 28/

But as I note in the article, the underlying idea of a robosigning copyright lawyer who automatically victimizes people based on an algorithmic accusation of infringement is alive and well. 29/

The US Copyright Office is currently planning to make this a legal requirement for all online platforms:

onezero.medium.com/nonstandard-me… 30/

Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/news/2022/01/3…

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

archive.org/download/Cory_…

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca… 31/

Image:
Nenad Stojkovic (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand…

CC BY 2.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.… 32/