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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

Creative Commons caused many issues in countries like Germany, with photographers publishing under CC with attribution clause, then hunting for sites using photos without or with not 100% correct attribution (in illegal pro-profit cooperations with lawyers) and suing the site owners for thousands of dollars. It really would have to be CC0, but even mentioning CC will raise a red flag for many now.

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> hunting for sites using photos without or with not 100% correct attribution

I do not see what is wrong about this part (other than the illegal(?) nexus with lawyers). CC licences still have to be complied with (or the user can contact the copyright holder for an alternative licence).

GPL infringers have been taken to court as well, and a legal, for-profit litigation initiative might be a good incentive that encourages compliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation

Since I've been victim of this practice, let me elaborate:

There are individuals in Germany (two photographers IIRC) who upload photos to the Wikipedia. The licence is always CC with attribution, but that part is badly presented on Wiki (or was). Next thing, they wait for people to use their images and go around to sue everyone who doesn't display the attribution string alongside the image. It is just predatory behavior. They guy sent me an E-Mail with an pay early option. Their claims are also this weak, that the guy trying to pull this off with me was instantly silenced after our lawyer sent him a single letter.

And Wikipedia doesn't want to change the missing attribution and "hidden" license for their images. I guess some of those participating in that scheme are active wikipedians and lobbying to keep things as they are.

Hmm, the text of the Creative Commons license is such that I would think such suits would be unsuccessful in court. Specifically, it has a section about reinstating your rights if you fix a violation of the license after you are notified. Has this ever been litigated? Of course receiving a demand letter is still a nuisance.

If this is a problem that you have knowledge about, have you ever considered contacting Creative Commons about this? They could perhaps provide legal guidance or even modify the next version of the license (if there is a next version).

I actually was sued over this exact thing and lost (and paid quite a bit of money). All for a little UI experiment that nobody saw but me, google and (via google image search) these vultures.

Please consider writing up the story and submitting as an HN post, that sounds horrific. Thanks.

I don't know if my writeup would add something new. It's actually a known practice here in germany (as I discovered after the fact). Here is a good article about it (in german and not the same photographer as in my case): https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Wikipedia-beraet-ueber-Dist...

Wow really, that's a pretty big problem. Which country?

Germany

> The licence ... is badly presented on Wiki

Maybe don't pull images from Wikipedia for exactly this reason?

I'm all for attribution in this case it was basically user generated content. We deployed measures to avoid this in the future afterwards, nonetheless I still think the practice is predatory. If I had ripped some artist off his hard work, sure. But not naming the photographer of an half-assed picture submitted to an article with close to zero traffic, in order to lure some people into copying the picture for your own profit is just shady.

Those guys were only publishing under the CC license to make a profit (by lawyer/court). I think thats wrong to abuse the CC license for profit this way.

Another detail of that scheme: Wikipedia actually does not do (correct) attribution on their site (no attribution next to the images. So if you mirror/copy Wikipedia content, in germany you will be sued by "photographers" who won't enforce their attribution on wikipedia but will on your site (to make a profit, see above).

> Wikipedia actually does not do (correct) attribution on their site (no attribution next to the images.

More recent versions like CC-BY-SA 4.0[1] explicitly say that it may be reasonable to attribute via a hyperlink.

Older licence versions do not have this line, but even then, it could be argued that Wikipedia itself is not infringing because attribution is still provided as part of the same work (considering the whole of the German Wikipedia as the work), rather than on an external site.

Unless German courts have already ruled that attribution has to be next to the image?

1. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a...

There's a few times I see the attribution next to the image itself (excluding the featured image, where there's plenty of spaces to do proper attribution).

"Order of Parental Glory" [1] is one of the examples. Strangely enough, many of the examples of inline attribution is for images from kremlin.ru, meaning there's probably some kind of agreement that mandates inline credits back in the days, but no longer anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Parental_Glory

If you have JavaScript enabled, attribution is displayed when you view the full-size image.

If you don't have JavaScript enabled, it's still displayed when you view the full-size image, but it loads a different page to do so.

Is it technically legal to show thumbnails without attribution?

There are many ways to go about this. Using the one that causes monetary harm and disincentives everyone to even consider hosting a site is not the ethical option to pick, but it's the one that is profitable in the short term. It's not like they couldn't just ask first to respect the license, but this isn't about respecting the license, it's about generating an income.

CC0 (with a zero, without the -BY part) is equivalent to public domain. I don't see how it would allow for the German popular sport of "Abmahnen" (threatening to sue). The reason it exists is that not all jurisdictions have a concept of public domain.

But yes, of course, if you use pictures under a CC-BY-* license, then you must comply with the terms (including attribution).

It's still called CC. I am aware of the licenses and their requirements, others who hear about the active scam will only see CC license and be alarmed. That's all I wrote above.

What was illegal about what they were doing?

To add a bit more detail: as far as I understand it (and I am no lawyer) the concept of an Abmahnung is that you notify someone of their (supposed) legal transgression, and give them the option to stop their behaviour and reimburse your costs (lawyer's fees and damages) to avoid going to court. For copyright claims in particular, it may be difficult to claim large damages, but sometimes the right holders collude with their lawyers by demanding the reimbursement of non-existent fees instead, which they then split as profits. This is illegal, as you are only allowed to claim costs that you have actually paid.

A (somewhat dated) example at [1] (german).

[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2009/11/17/abmahnanwalte-ver...

The shared for-profit part of the scheme. It's one thing to hire a lawyer to get a license respected, it's another to institute to what amounts to a fraud scheme: Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible, "hire" a lawyer for free with a profit sharing agreement, then sue who you can. That profit sharing agreement is illegal here, but hard to prove, and the Abmahnindustrie is actively protected by politicians (many of which are lawyers, pure coincidence of course).

Edit: When they send in that notice (die Abmahnung) they will ask for money for incurred costs. Since they did not pay anything in advance - the lawyer worked for free - there were no costs. That's not legal here.

> Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible

What exactly was going on? Have they published images in misleading way?

Or is it case of going after people who published images with "source: Internet"? Or case of attacking people who made honest effort to attribute author?

Because I am familiar with big corporations using freely licensed work and ignoring attribution requirements. For example Facebook is displaying map using OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap license requires a clear attribution, visible to all users ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright ).

Facebook is ignoring that, Facebook employees claimed to be working on improvements, nothing was improved - attribution is still cleverly hidden.

The same with for example Snapchat.

No, wrong target - big enterprises have lawyers of their own. The target goal here is the 13 year old that published a fan page on neocities. He won't defend himself, the parents will pay, and that the claimed image licensing costs are way higher than what usually can be claimed in such a situation they will not notice.

If there are sources confirming targeting such cases as "13 year old that published a fan page on neocities" then I can become outraged.

But for all what I know they could be targeting marketing departments using stolen photos in ads.

“If there are sources” — the answer is different depending on whether you speak German or not. The practices of the so-called “Abmahnindustrie” (legal warning industry?) are well publicized in German media and widely known in the German tech sector. It might be hard to find an authoritative source in English.

As far as I understand, they don’t get that much more damages from larger cases, so they target masses of small fish instead. Individual ebay sellers, small private clubs (which are ingrained in the German culture) and the like.

The typical target is small business, nonprofits, schools, etc.

But large business/enterprise screws up with image licensing too, and ends up just paying as well.

CC0 is the norm on Pexels (based in Germany). It adds a clause to forbid reselling on other sites, but that's it.

That's not CC0, and is not even a free content license. "Right to fork" is integral to any definition of free/open content.

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