CC will have them 'quaking in their boots'

January 31, 2022 9:35 AM

For the first 14 years the Creative Commons (CC) license stated that the it would “terminate automatically upon any breach.” Basically the five terms included naming the creator and license, providing a URL for the work and license and noting if the work was modified. Falling short means that you are no longer a licensed user. Copyleft trolls are taking advantage of that framework to automate finding copyleft infringement - using willing artists, automated search tools and robosigning mills to find and threaten anyone infringing on the copyright with the $150,000 in statutory damages for “wilful infringement.”

Of course Cory Doctorow has been targeted by Pixsy on behalf of photographer Nenad Stojkovic.

Previously: our own Matt Haughey was there all the way back when CC launched.

posted by zenon (31 comments total)

Kind of buried in TFA, but the "bug" has (belatedly) been fixed.

in 2015, the CC organization released the current licenses, Version 4.0, including a “cure provision” that gives people who make attribution mistakes the legal right to a 30-day grace period after notification of the error to make it right

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:51 AM on January 31, 2022 [13 favorites]

This article enraged me. Imagine, copyleft trolls.

There was a somewhat similar shakedown going on with Patrick Hardy and the Linux kernel. That has finally been resolved with Hardy agreeing to not sue individually anymore. Lots of differences from the Creative Commons situation, the details matter significantly. But same broad theme.
posted by Nelson at 9:57 AM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

Code is law, baby.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:04 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Code is law, baby.

You'd be hard pressed to find anything from 1999 that was born more misguided or that's aged worse.
posted by mhoye at 10:06 AM on January 31, 2022 [17 favorites]

What does "Code is Law" have to do with this? Other than it being the title of a book by Larry Lessig, who also was involved in Creative Commons? The ideas in "Code in Law" are not particularly visible in Creative Commons.
posted by Nelson at 10:16 AM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

pretty much all of The Cathedral & The Bazaar is a howler now.
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" ...
posted by scruss at 10:16 AM on January 31, 2022 [8 favorites]

What does the Cathedral and the Bazaar have to do with this? That's a book about open source software development. This article is about Creative Commons licensing of works other than software. C&B is mostly about the culture of software development, too, not the fine points of licensing and enforcement.
posted by Nelson at 10:22 AM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

What does “Code is Law” have to do with this? Other than it being the title of a book by Larry Lessig, who also was involved in Creative Commons? The ideas in "Code in Law" are not particularly visible in Creative Commons.

Not, much, it’s just a phrase that has been in the zeitgeist lately thanks to all of the web3 nonsense of the moment - I was just being flip. I do think it has something to do with CC though, given Lessig’s involvement. I consider CC a kind of positive example of “code is law”, in contrast to DAOs et. al. - something machine readable that ties back to a legal document but does not, in and of itself, enforce a rule.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:36 AM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

he should file a suit in federal court for declaratory relief based on the now-withdrawn letter and get a federal judge to consider the legality of this entire practice. shady lawyers prevail because the vast majority of people pay, so it never ends up in court, and they continue to grift in the shadows.
posted by wibari at 10:37 AM on January 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is fascinating. It sure seems like the artists are complicit. There's nothing preventing them from writing a note that says, "I grant you retroactive permission to use this in the same way that you have been," or, "I license this work under the new version of the CC license," in which case, presumably, the legal threats are moot. I'm not sure that convincing people of good will to switch to a new license is actually a solution. People of good will aren't doing this.

I suggest switching to my new Creative Comnons license, which is nearly identical but also includes a statement in the middle of the second to last paragraph that anyone who uses the work agrees to pay the rights holder $500 upon request.
posted by eotvos at 11:05 AM on January 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think the idea is more to convince hosting platforms to either drop or strongly disfavor content using the 2.0 licenses.
posted by Pyry at 11:33 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well it reminded me that my stupid website still used CC 2.5 licenses, so that's fixed at least.

I wish there was a better story about the beatdown Doctorow gave to the company though. When I see a "you messed with the wrong person" story I kind of look forward to a detailed discussion of how the offending party was kneecapped, and this left me wanting.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:42 AM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wish there was a better story about the beatdown Doctorow gave to the company though.

Well he did take all of their wuffie points, left them in a bombed out ghost shell of a mall and took away all of the Radio Shacks for everyone forever.
posted by loquacious at 12:17 PM on January 31, 2022 [10 favorites]

I miss Radio Shack.
posted by biogeo at 12:58 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Kind of buried in TFA, but the "bug" has (belatedly) been fixed.

The "bug" was fixed in the terms going forward, but that has only limited effect. There are, as he points out, billions of items with older CC licenses. The only person who can opt to upgrade existing material is the rights-holder.

Keep in mind, the photographer in question for his case selected CC2.0 for a 2020 photo, what Doctorow frames as the most copyleft-troll friendly version, despite 4.0 existing for what was at the time 7 years (it was released in 2013, according to Wikipedia, not 2015).

While we can't prove that any one instance of choosing a version of the license that has been out of date since 2005 (when 2.5 came out) was intentional for copyleft trolling purposes, the people who intend to game this inevitably will continue to use exactly that method.

Let's just hope that the photo sharing sites start taking the "put up warnings about older CC licenses when viewing those images" technique seriously, as that is the step with the most power to blunt this...
posted by mystyk at 1:03 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's like that short story "Nanolaw with Daughter", except with six-figure penalties instead of microtransactions.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:23 PM on January 31, 2022

Keep in mind, the photographer in question for his case selected CC2.0 for a 2020 photo

The photographer originally uploaded his photo to Flickr before it was imported into Commons. It appears that Flickr is in part to blame — the newest version of the CC licenses that Flickr will let a photographer use is 2.0. So it is hard to definitely say this photographer deliberately chose an older CC license. Fortunately, Cory Doctorow says plans on supporting the new license versions as well as implementing tools that encourage upgrading the license on existing Flickr photos.
posted by RichardP at 4:07 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

Why didn’t Cory just take his own photo of a hand on a mouse? Not exactly great art.
posted by Ideefixe at 5:41 PM on January 31, 2022

Belittling the artistic or technical value of the photo is kind of responding to the wrong question.
posted by mark k at 5:54 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's becoming pretty obvious that this kind of thing is a core property of information technology: by lowering the cost of information and communication we also lower the cost of all kinds of terrible behavior. Scams and abuse have always been common, but IT enables a scale that incentivizes all kinds of bad behavior that would previously not have been profitable.

In this particular case, the scammers presumably relied on automated web crawling, large databases of personal data (so, something that could be made more difficult with better privacy laws), and of course automated emails.

It makes an interesting parallel to Thomas Piketty's framing of the economy in terms of potential wage earnings vs potential (agricultural): if your only ticket to a decent living is to marry rich you're not going to work too hard. I don't think we're necessarily in danger of having everyone clock out and start an internet-enabled scam, but there is large and probably growing lawlessness that IT is incentivizing. (see e.g. ransomware) A bit part of the problem is that it doesn't just make the act easier, it makes punishing the perpetrators more difficult because 1. the crime is new (or not even technically a crime) and 2. the available remedies or punishments don't scale the way that the bad actions do.
posted by ropeladder at 5:58 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

You'd be hard pressed to find anything from 1999 that was born more misguided or that's aged worse.

I'll take Dennis Hastert's Speakership for $500.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:39 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

It sounds like Doctorow did correctly cite the cc license and the issue here wasn’t the bug in the cc license but instead the trolls expectation that he wouldn’t have cited it correctly or possibly that Flickr originally applied a license to this image that was not expressly selected by the artist. The article is a bit confused on this point.
posted by interogative mood at 6:55 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

You'd be hard pressed to find anything from 1999 that was born more misguided or that's aged worse.

I've known some fucked-up 22 year olds
posted by Merus at 6:56 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is why we can't have wonderful things.
posted by fairmettle at 10:01 PM on January 31, 2022

I am really hesitant to blame Flickr for anything when they are a major, if not the foremost source of Commons images. Look in any Wikipedia article and there's a decent chance the images came via Flickr. It's inconvenient that they have a dated license, sure, but some commons is a lot better than none. I truly do not understand copyleft trolls. I would love to see someone go after the numerous companies that outright steal copyrighted content from individuals, for their own benefit. Those are the folks who should be sued for the $150K per instance.
posted by wnissen at 9:29 AM on February 1, 2022

Have there been actual lawsuits around this or is the trolling strategy more about threatening lawsuits? Also wondering if there's any resources or strategies to protect oneself, either before or after receiving this kind of communication.
posted by overglow at 9:33 AM on February 1, 2022

→ ... blame Flickr for anything when they are a major, if not the foremost source of Commons images

I hope they've stopped allowing people to download your non-CC images then immediately re-upload the very same images as CC. Someone did that with my entire photo collection, and while I think I caught them all, it was a bit of a fight to get them off Wikipedia
posted by scruss at 9:41 AM on February 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

From personal experience, actual artists (not the grifter artists) probably aren't (or at least don't have to be) complicit here.

I got copyright trolled a while back (luckily, just having started law school, I was like, hmm this seems like something I can just ignore and a prof confirmed) and it was on behalf of, like, CNN. As long as the grifter never actually files suit, there's nothing that stops them from *saying* CNN's a client and demanding my payment.

Now, sure, CNN might've been trying to use a fly by night "lawyer" to hit me up for fifty bucks worth of fair use, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it.
posted by TheProfessor at 2:57 PM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

Here's a twitter thread regarding the intersection of CC licensing, general copyright, and SCP-173 (if you've ever heard of SCP, you probably know SCP-173).
posted by mhum at 6:48 PM on February 1, 2022

OT but this post led me to this which led me to this and as someone who joined MeFi in... idk. 2019? 2020? That 2008 post is an entirely different world. A whole different vibe.

Current MeFi, while much less active, is also... kinder? More earnest? The comments are way longer?
posted by pelvicsorcery at 7:33 AM on February 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Cory described the flaw in old CC licenses as a 'bug' and in a sense that's apt, it's one of those bugs like the log4j vulnerability which is widespread, hard to trace, easy to exploit and will have serious consequences for the unsuspecting for many years to come. And yes, Cory had to write a snide email to Pixsy, but it's charities, non-profits and individuals who are going to bear the brunt of the burden here, having heard that using Creative Commons images is a safe way to save on stock licensing fees.

Also like bugs in open source software, there isn't nearly enough "how did this trainwreck come about?" happening. Lawyers were involved in drawing up these licenses. Were they badly briefed? Did no one ask what could happen if a malicious actor acquired the rights to CC-licensed work?

Sure, the real villains here are the copyleft trolls, but licences exist in general because the world contains bad actors and CC came into existence, at least in part, because of copyright trolls. A major purpose of CC was to protect regular people from them.

This isn't just the luxury of hindsight. I don't know if anyone predicted the specific way CC licenses have been exploited, but I wasn't the only person who advised caution when CC proponents were encouraging the use of 'permissively' licensed free images. My main concern was the vague non-commercial license, but I also found the wide variety of attribution requirements worrying.

I wish I could find the blog post where someone said there was no need to worry because the people who license images under CC were by definition motivated by goodwill. There's a strong contender for the 'aged badly' crown discussed above.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 1:01 PM on February 3, 2022