[lefstathiou]

Someone tried to shake our company down once. They posted all this stock imagery on the web, waited for someone to use it with an ambiguously worded attribution policy, then have a third party chase you down and demand $100k but will settle for $5k.

It turns out we did attribute the right way (in our terms of use) and could prove it with logs of when we added the language and when it was removed after we removed the image, but I am sure they nail people all the time with this strategy. This didnt stop them from sending 20 emails, demand lawyers get on the phone, etc.

There are a couple of similar scams like this out there.

[arjie]

Oh that's a classic trick. It's been going on for decades. One example I am particularly familiar with is that of Larry Philpot / User:Nightshooter on Wikimedia Commons. He would upload his photos there with an addendum on how he should be attributed. Any slight impression in the attribution would be followed by legal action. It was obviously a copyright troll mechanism and now all of his photos on Wikimedia Commons have forced attribution affixed by users that warns others that he sues people.

His stuff is so widespread that the consensus on Wikimedia Commons was to keep his photos and add a warning so that no one ends up accidentally using it. Some accused him of sock-puppetry to get his content into a place.

Today, intellectual property maximalism is a much more mainstream position so perhaps modern Internet users will think that he is in the right, but I think it's a bit much.

Here's the thread where he's discussed: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27...

Here's an example forced-attribution photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg

[jeltz]

Could he ever win a case in court? At least the Swedish legal system is based a lot around common sense and good faith and such a trap would likely end up with the one who sued having to pay the legal costs for both parties.

[arjie]

Larry Philpot actually did win a case in court. His case was first dismissed but then on appeal the Fourth Circuit granted him the win: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca4/21...

[ahartmetz]

The US legal system is famously not very much based on common sense and good faith. The US has 3x as many lawyers per capita as other Western countries and for some reason idolizes lawyers.

[dcrazy]

Is your reaction based on reading the linked case? Because it seems pretty sensible to me. Philpot licensed the photo to AXS under traditional terms, and also posted it to Wikimedia with a CC-BY license. IJR put a copy of the photo in their listicle, did not follow either license, and then tried to claim fair use. It’s clearly not fair use. The whole reason you put photos in an article is to make people want to read the article—this hasn’t changed since the early days of newspaper photography. And the whole reason for publishing the article is commercial: to sell ads against it.

[ahartmetz]

Admittedly it's not based on the linked case.

[foxglacier]

His cases that I could find are where the company republishing his photos didn't attribute them to him at all so it seems fair to sue (except when it turned out to be fair use). What is this attribution error you mentioned? CC BY-SA 3.0 is pretty onerous "You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made." All 3 things are required. Maybe every CC-BY photographer should be suing newspapers for stealing their work, shouldn't they?

[arjie]

I was curious about this a few years ago so I took a look around and found another case, the one of Thomas Wolf / User:Der_Wolf_im_Wald, but this guy seems to be getting away with it because he has a 'no-derivatives' box on the image page. He has the same modus operandi:

1. Post the photo to Wikimedia Commons

2. Mark it CC-BY or derivative (say CC-BY-SA etc.)

3. Have a highly precise attribution clause

4. Sue everyone who uses it without the specific attribution

The funny thing about this copyleft troll is that Someone Who Is Not Him creates accounts on Reddit (e.g. this one[0]) that post exclusively about how they made a mistake and the photographer was well within his rights to sue and you should take him very seriously and negotiate the amount.

> We actually violated copyright law before he wrote to us. So it was our mistake and we apologized for that.

I really should create a List page for this on my personal wiki so I can remember all these guys. I find this kind of behavior galling.

People did bring up this stuff here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Der_Wolf_im_Wal.....

But since I don't speak German well enough and inevitably this is going to end up in such a situation where you have to, I think it best I don't pursue deletion here. Hopefully a German speaker will see fit, referencing the other cases here.

0: https://www.reddit.com/user/No_Significance7032/

[zem]

I am honestly flabbergasted that his pictures weren't expunged with great prejudice. what is the value they add to wikimedia that makes being associated with this sort of sleaze okay?

[teraflop]

If you read the discussion, they weren't kept because of their encyclopedic value, or because they were "widespread". I'm not sure why the parent commenter said that.

They were kept to preserve a record of their having been uploaded, and to not create a legal risk for third parties who might be relying on the Commons page as their way to provide attribution.

The original proposal was to keep the image pages with the metadata, but delete the image files. That turned out to have some technical hurdles, so instead the images were overwritten with versions containing big ugly attribution messages, to discourage their use.

[zem]

ah thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

[arjie]

A valid question. These kinds of approaches are a pretty standard attack in the copyleft world. I don't know on what basis the community chooses forced-attribution vs deletion.

Marco Verch managed to get his stuff deleted: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests...

So it's a question of the execution of the operation really.

By the way, do you also have the same user handle on Reddit? I have the vaguest memory of you quoting someone else on the subject of denying a person suffering on the street drugs that went something to the effect of not wanting to do it because denying such a man drugs deny him his only escape from such reality or something of the sort.

I never did find that comment again, and it's been at the back of my mind for years (perhaps even a decade) and now I'm not even sure if I've asked you this before.

[zem]

yes that was me! I love that quote (it's by samuel johnson), so it's really moving to hear it made an impression on someone else too. here it is:

What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."

-- Piozzi: Anecdotes

[arjie]

Ha, perfect! Well that's one mystery solved. Thank you.

[tecoholic]

I don’t understand why this is sleazy TBH. It’s CC-BY-SA. If attribution isn’t provided it’s a valid case. I once uploaded a map of my state with all the districts in labels in English and my language Tamil to commons under CC-BY-SA. It was used left right and centre, from publications, map sellers to the point I can see them hanging in offices. It’s always pained me, nothing could be done about it. Now I didn’t want money, would have liked the recognition, but would have settled for just seeing the CC-BY-SA logo on it at the least.

[arjie]

CC-BY-SA-4.0 fixes the specific technique of spreading one's work through the commons and then charging for inadequate attribution by allowing for a 30 day cure period on notification. This anti-copyleft-troll clause should likely permit your use-case.

[tecoholic]

Ah! I see. My biggest annoyance was none of the derivatives ever made it back to the commons.

[zem]

it's sleazy because the intent wasn't to be properly credited, it was to use a loophole in the CC-BY-SA license to sue people for minor typos or mistakes in the exact form of the attribution even when they had clearly intended to give proper attribution.

[tecoholic]

I get what you are saying now. That does makes a difference and actually hurts the copyleft culture.

[jabl]

Sounds like the creative commons attribution scam as detailed by Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/01/pixsynnussija/