An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats | Hacker News Reader

An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats

doctorow.medium.com

231 pointsdwynings44 comments

I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies. In his case these employees conducted themselves in a manner that lend to said outing.

To quote Doctorow: "In other words, I only engaged in conduct that your own employees insisted was legitimate."

"That said, I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."

The submission for the previous post didn't get much traction here, so I'm seeing it for the first time. I'm pretty sure that "YYYYYYY" (ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy) is still named later in the post.

A few people have commented to the effect that this is a tempest in a teapot, but the phenomenon of copyleft trolling is news to me. It's fundamentally contrary to the spirit of Creative Commons and like-minded licenses, and has a chilling effect on their use. Cory claims that another of Pixsy's clients, Marco Verch, single-handedly shuttered a Dutch charity.

I've never paid much attention to the Creative Commons version numbers. I sure will now.

>ugh, Medium tries to hijack copy

you can set 'dom.even.clipboardevents.enabled' to 'false' in about:config if you are on Firefox (/ forks). This should prevent websites from knowing when you copy / paste something.

So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque...

Or, since that legally iffy, they probably have bots that scan for usagr of CC-licensed content, and when they get hits, they ask the content creator if they would like to be their client and get a percentage of the "mugging"...

> So they have clients? I thought they just send out claims and quietly collect the cheque...

Of course they have clients. Only the actual copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement.

Companies have been known to claim copyright and ask for settlement without owning said copyright. I've been targeted like this, for a media piece that's been public domain for over half a century.

> I normal don't like outing employees publicly for the conduct of companies.

Why not? Companies don’t act autonomously. If a company does something, it’s because somewhere along the line a human representing that company either did it directly or set it into motion.

I’d agree with you if you were against outing individual employees for honest mistakes (unless they’re particularly negligent; there’s a lot of gray area here). But I’m not really into exculpating people for their misdeeds just because they did them on behalf of a company.

Cases like this make me wonder about "all publicity is good publicity". I don't see a good result from Pixsy from this.

But then, I don't know their customer acquisition strategy. "Picking a fight with a vocal, famous, copyrights activist" might be right up there on page 2.

I used to hang out on the Photography reddit. They have a couple of commonly shared opinions that just don't sit right with me.

The first is that people who don't like being photographed in street photography can kick rocks, because taking and selling pictures of strangers is perfectly legal.

The second is that anyone who violates their copyright should be punished severely, even if the other party was naive or made a mistake. Unsurprisingly, they love Pixsy: https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/k9jt7u/1_year_...

Personally, I find both of these viewpoints ethically inconsistent and pretty gross. It turned me off both the subreddit and photography as a hobby.

Thankfully the first part is explicitly illegal in France :) You need an authorisation before filming/taking pictures of people, because of image rights ( droit à l'image).

Interestingly, the first ever candid photo of a person was taken in France.

https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/premier...

If I read Doctorow correctly he implies that people shelling out content creation and using outdated licenses in the hope of people making attribution mistakes might be their target clientele. These might not be negatively impacted by this behavior.

Yeah, I can see that. It could be all part of the plan

Wow ... everyone knows that the Doctorow effect is stronger than the Streisand effect. That even fools know better which is a good indication of where Pixsy's organizational intelligence lies.

He's certainly got his fanbase, but the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days.

I kept reading looking for some sort of cohesive, intelligent discussion to be expected from one of internet techs' supposed brightest thinking minds and instead it felt like I was reading a 16 year old's livejournal. They sent me a legal threat! And I told them to go away, and they DID IT AGAIN!

Summarizing pages of rambling: corp is trolling people by using old versions of the Creative Commons to go after people for "minor" mistakes in attribution. They keep sending (likely automated) emails to Doctorow. He takes them far too seriously, and instead of just sending them a 'stop wasting my time' letter from his lawyer, he wastes even more time.

> the fact that he wasted this much time writing such along-winded rant on this shows how much free time he has on his hands these days.

What a strange take. That "long rant" (is a few paragraphs considered long these days? My goodness) probably took him a whole hour.

Who cares how much spare time he has?

I'll never understand the internet soap operas people like to get all worked up about.

Copyleft trolling is such a new, and frankly dangerous concept, I for one am glad Cory Doctorow lost a bit of time to this journalistic endeavour.

Hurray I say!

I've dealt with companies like this, and they're the absolute worst. The worst thing about getting a legal threat is that you don't know if it's from a real lawyer or is just a shakedown made to look like it's from a lawyer. This usually means having to pay my own lawyer to review the threat and tell me if I need to respond, so even if it's "fake" it costs me time and legal fees.

Shots fired, fantastic article.

He should seek declaratory relief that he does not owe anything and get 150k from THEM for their error.

On one side, we have a company using a shady business model, trying to pick a fight with a notorious internet personality. Sounds like a bad use of their time, but if they were looking for visibility, well, they found it.

On the other side, we have an internet personality making a fuss out of trollish email he could safely answer with a single-line reply ("put up or shut up"). Sounds like a bad use of his time, but if he was looking for (renewed) visibility, well, he got it.

And then there is me reading about this nonsensical crap. Which was definitely a bad use of my time.

Someone deeply involved in Creative Commons writing about professional copyright trolls abusing it is "nonsensical crap" and a "bad use of time"?

He had already written about it, and it's a lot of noise over nothing - Pixsy are not going to sue him, today or tomorrow. Their continued trolling was effectively begging for this sort of reaction, which they duly obtained.

This is the internet equivalent of political talk shows with people shouting at each other: nothing gets done, nothing changes, and it only benefits the shout-heads.

Patent trolls have gotten a tougher time making money because we have kept talking about the problem. See this example here, which refers to the TC Heartland decision, and politicians saying a judge's decision is reprehensible: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/appeals-court-ea...

There is such a thing as the court of public opinion, and legal progress is made by talking about debilitating legal crap.

But this isn’t that. This is not even a letter before action. This is just a bunch of inconsequential emails.

Well, at least it'll be good that if anyone else got a letter from this company, googling the name will lead them to this takedown.

I'm curious what makes Doctorow notorious. I read some of his short stories, with mixed feelings.

Agreed with your point on this article not being a good use of the reader's time.

He helped put together a zine/blog that got popular in the early days of the web, and was an early blogger (when weblogs were few and novel). Then became a bit of a parody of himself.

Doctorow's not notorious, he's just famous (in certain circles.) Emphasis mine:

notorious - adj - famous or well known, typically for some bad quality or deed.

I would call that definition prescriptive and not descriptive. In practice, people use the term mostly for someone who's famous or well-known because of some bad quality or deed, and sometimes for someone who's famous or well-known and who additionally has some bad quality or has done a bad deed.

Being in the right place at the right time during the internet boom, having hipster glasses, and writing so-so near-future scifi stories which appeal to the sort of people who write "GNU/Linux" non-ironically.

On rare occasion I end up on BoingBoing or reading some post he's written, I'm reminded of why I still haven't read a single novel he's written, despite them being free.

They're actually not that bad "Unauthorised Bread" made me laugh out loud a few times, and some of them are pretty short so if you find you don't like them it's not a huge waste of your time. Anyway, it's one of those things where up front you might think "bleh" but it's actually not bad.

There are two sides to every story.

I'd prefer to reserve judgment on this until I can clearly see both sides.

I feel both sides could be as wrong as each other, both seem quite harsh, and uncalled for.

Also, the author describes themselves as an "activist", this sets off alarm bells.

I know what you mean by those alarm bells. But in that very article: "I also spent a lot of time in Brussels agitating for the passage of the GDPR". If anybody's justified calling themselves activist, surely that's Doctorow. I'm sure you'll find more reasons, if you just search what he actually does, for about 2 minutes.

Outing the employees involved honestly was pretty petty. The company sending the letter messed up but that’s no reason for a well-known journalist to take a minimum wage worker to town.

They didn't mess up, they're executing their business plan which might be summarised as "find minor infringments of attributions and, instead of asking for said error to be fixed, fire off demand for loot under threat of legal action"

Real shame that someone who's own web-site [0] has the strap-line "No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period." publishes on Medium which imposes tracking on readers with no option to opt-out and will not display the simple article text without support of 44 active scripts!

[0] https://pluralistic.net/

You can let a mistake go or you can go on a crusade. It does seem like fighting with perceived enemies is good for brand building though. They always need an enemy: big sugar, big tech, big something or other.

“Crusades” against malicious actors are arguably warranted (depending on your mental model and belief system); that’s a bit of a loaded term though. Properly framed, it’s vigilant accountability of bad actors. Otherwise, these actors inflict emotional/financial pain and suffering on the unsophisticated or those unequipped to defend themselves for profit and/or power. I won’t enumerate the examples here; they are numerous and readily available for studying.

Higher level, malicious actors don’t hold themselves accountable. Perhaps there are so many “Big” issues because of those taking advantage of dysfunctional systems.

If Pixsy really does copyright troll people, then they will continue to do so unless someone picks up the crusade as you call it. Arguably building an email/forum/phonecall spam filter or fighting more serious offenses like over prescribing dangerous drugs, or nursing homes that take control of their residents assets and sell them is just crusading as well. Unethical or outright criminal people usually don't stop in the absence of consequences.

So the company should have let the error pass and not answer with additional legal threats?

Or should Doctorow just ignored the not so thinly veiled (and wrongly made) threats.

Should a journalist not call into question wrong conduct by a company?

> I named both the Pixsy employee who threatened me and their supervisor, who apologized but refused to answer my questions about how these threats came to be sent, and whether Pixsy was a company that made a practice out of copyleft trolling.

They did apologize and his demands were rejected because, really, it was more like a fishing expedition. He then escalated the situation because he couldn't accept their apology and thought it was part of a wider conspiracy. They responded in kind. So much drama over nothing.

Fishing for people's money by sending out a large number of potentially fraudulent legal threats in order to obtain a minority of payments out of fearful people isn't much different morally than a scammer sending out thousands of fraudulent threats to cut off people's power in order to get a minority to pay up.

A criminal protection racket that is rarely on the side of right on any more than the most technical terms and often not even that isn't owed a nice response to their threats any more than a burglar is owed a fresh cup of coffee and a pleasant work environment while he loads your stuff into a moving van.

> They responded in kind?

Replying with additional legal threats isn't what I would call "responding in kind".

But to quote the original article:

"I am happy to report I have removed the names of your employees from my article. I don’t do this because you threatened me, but because I am an ethical person, and ethical people do not deliberately seek to cause distress in others (for example, by sending thousands upon thousands of unethical legal threats)."

Legal threat is a temper tantrum in this case. They are sparring pointlessly.

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