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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

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)."

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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.

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