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Comment by joshuaissac | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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