A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)

The first notice Cory received claimed to be a second notice, and he assumes he missed the first one, but I&#x27;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.<p>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.

I wonder does making a minor mistake in attribution really count as &quot;wilful infringement&quot;? As a layman, I would expect that any reasonable attempts to comply with license requirements should indicate that infringement was accidental. Sure, if it&#x27;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.

Alternative location: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;a-bug-in-early-creative-c...</a>

&quot;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.&quot;<p>Wow this is such an amazing and unethical scam. What do you do in a situation like this?

The 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.

Photography in particular is frustratingly easy to get wrong. Even if someone tries to be careful, there are a number of conditions that I&#x27;m guessing aren&#x27;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 <i>all the time</i>.<p>Finally that doesn&#x27;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.

For anybody that didn&#x27;t read the whole article, I&#x27;ll point attention to this section at the end:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;22&#x2F;2021-27705&#x2F;technical-measures-public-consultations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.federalregister.gov&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;22&#x2F;2021-27...</a>

A &quot;bug&quot; is a very generous term for how severely punitive CC 1.x, 2.x and 3.x were.<p>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.<p>It was broken for nearly two decades.

Clever. Since not obeying some item of a CC license implies that you&#x27;re not covered by such license, &quot;bad guys&quot; might induce someone to infringe the CC and then violate the copyright

(2022)<p>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?

One thing I wonder about CC is whether you have to include attribution and license in the same page the work is embedded. It&#x27;s common sense that this would be the case, but in Wikipedia, for example, CC works don&#x27;t actually have attribution in the page they&#x27;re shown, you have to click on them to see the attribution.<p>I wish this was clarified. Like, why is Wikipedia allowed to do this? Is it because they&#x27;re thumbnails?

TIL that Hal Abelson, nerd-famous for the programming book _Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs_ (SICP), was involved in creating Creative Commons. Amazing achievements!

&gt; However, Titan Media’s lawyer Gill Sperlein told TorrentFreak that this is absolutely not the case.<p>&gt; “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.<p>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?<p>Even if they didn&#x27;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 <i>my own father</i> doing that, we&#x27;d have a falling out.

Clearly the next thing is to robosign grievances against lawyers.

So... I&#x27;m somewhere between &quot;yes obviously CC is intending to facilitate reuse&quot; and &quot;yes obviously people who choose it often do so because they see others choosing it and don&#x27;t read the fine details&quot; and also &quot;the majority of uses are probably acceptable by the creators&quot;...<p>... and: if you wanted to <i>just allow reuse</i> we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain. CC requires attribution.<p><i>That means it requires attribution</i>. Among other things. That is arguably the main point of CC over Public Domain.<p>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 <i>extreme</i> and I don&#x27;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&#x27;s the crux of any &quot;don&#x27;t steal from artists&quot; and &quot;exposure is not payment&quot; argument.

I&#x27;m a fan of the old BIPCOT (1) Licence. Let&#x27;s see them discuss that in a ministerial setting…<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bipcot.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bipcot.org&#x2F;</a>

&gt;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.

Talk about burying the lede:<p>&gt; 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.

A lawyer I know once pointed out that a good first step one receipt of anything like this is to reply with &quot;Please provide me with the full name and address of your counsel so I may know to whom I should address subsequent correspondence.&quot;<p>If you do not receive an answer, you are not dealing with someone who is serious about taking you to court.<p>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&#x27;t be spooky, send the full details to the bar association).<p>Only if you are put in contact with an actual lawyer should you waste any energy thinking about this further.

The original email sent from Pixsy contained the following text, which the author ignored by publishing the email in entirety.<p>&gt; 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.<p>Can someone with knowledge comment on this practice? Are these just empty words? Or is it legally enforceable to send an email and forbid &quot;copying&quot; or publishing&#x2F;disclosing the contents?

I hate articles that go on and on about some story before finally explaining what&#x27;s in the title.