A couple of messages about changes to ianVisits
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
This practice has brought me a lot of joy over the years. My photos have appeared on Wikipedia, in concert promotions, and even in a special Ibiza edition of Monopoly. The Monopoly team didn't have to, but they sent me two copies of the game as a thank-you, which was a lovely touch.
For those of you who are like-minded and have photos that could be of public interest, consider setting a Creative Commons license on platforms like Flickr. Doing so could ease the burden for small publishers like ianVisits, allowing them to use high-quality images without worrying about legal repercussions.
If these enforcement services were legitimate entities instead of parasitic trolls, they would start by providing the infringer with options to either remove the image or purchase a royalty free license at a reasonable price, and only impose punitive fees if they continued to infringe.
Are people with blogs really paying Getty Images £150-£450 to have one of their images on their blog post? I suspect nobody else was paying the photographers for the images before this and nobody will after, it changes nothing.
1. http://www.londonfreelance.org/rates/index.php?work=Photogra...
"Royalty free licenses" are typically one-offs. You pay a fixed amount and then are free to reproduce the work as many times as you want. Some of these contracts might be limited, i.e. you can only do it in one magazine issue etc.
But it's simpler accounting to go with "give me $1000 for use of my photo in one case" or even "everything" but then rarely my photo ends up on the cover of Harry Potter 12: Eclectic Boogaloo and I feel I missed out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_Managed
They're still in use, but represent a smaller share of a much larger pie created by Royalty-Free licenses.
I use to create and post images without any watermark and just use reverse image search to demand fees, that was the whole business model
but then everything went deep web with Facebook and group chats so it couldnt be found
The only thing worse than copyright trolls are the I will give you """exposure""" if you give me this for free crowd.
If people want their work circlated for free then they can license it and give it away as such.
The credit industry, traditionally, has a cascade of debt collection tiers. Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt. The value of the debt (asset, to the collector) decreases drastically as we travel down the tiers. The "quality" of collectors also decreases. Business models that depend on illegal practices, betting on inadequate enforcement. Trial preparations that depend on 99% certainty of defendant not showing up. Most of the debt might be arbitrarily imposed interest and fines to nonresponsive "clients." The lawyer present may not have paperwork, or even know the companies' originally owed.
Financial assets like bad debt portfolios scale and bundle wonderfully, so there's no floor. There are multi-million dollar packages out there selling for $1000. An enterprising individual might take a blind chance. Apply creative means of collecting 1.3% of total debt. Maybe you offer 90% settlements. Maybe impose 500% fees and sell on. Maybe you specialise in deceased estates, acquire high morbidity debtor lists, and use systemic timing to advantge. Maybe you rebunde such that specialists can have a crack.
Anyway... At the copyright trolling end of this game, I'd make a distinction between "photographers," "rights holders" and the "copyright biz." What some shady lawtech startup does to monetize a copyright portfolio owned by their pay-per-performance client... "Photographer" is not really an active category within this structure.
I think there should be a law stating that if your debt is sold to a third party and you are not offered to settle with the same amount than the third party was paying, the debt should be automatically forgiven. Yep, that would make many loans more difficult to issue, and that would be net good.
"that would make many loans more difficult to issue"
Maybe in some cases, but I'm broadly skeptical. Selling bad debt is usually not an important part of non-shady businesses models. 2nd order effects, if any, are likely to be the main concern. If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.
Honestly, I think the debt stuff (also aspects of copyright) are just the loose ends of major industries. Most bad debt or long tail IP assets aren't worth much. But if you can bundle, they're never too small to monetize.
Once you have an industry dedicated to squeezing that last drop... you probably have a destructive industry.
IMO, the best solutions is policing. Somehow, policing is rarely mentioned as a solution to corporate crime. That might mean occasionally tweaking laws to help make policing effective... but that only makes sense ifyou are already policing.
I bet these trolls are as sloppy as the victims they're targeting. At least in debt collection, at a certain depth... they're not doing any due diligence. Often, all they have is a name, number and sum. That means they often are collecting on BS premises. Charge them with fraud, or racketeering. A business practice premised on demanding payment of a debt, without proof that the debt is real... that's an extortion racket.
I wonder if the trolls here can stand up to scrutiny. Do they actually own the rights? Have they based their business model on strategic avoidance of due diligence? From what I've heard, IP trolling exists by exploiting liability limits of both corporate law, and practical law enforcement.
Yep. And the next order effect is that the business stops selling bad debt and sits on it. And eventually starts thinking more carefully to whom lends money.
The chains of effect leading to a useful improvement in lending prudence... long. The opportunities to stray some other way, many. Graveyards are full of wonks that expect a minor policy tweak to fix a problem, rather than just move it around.
Most of these debts are unpaid bills, car payments, etc. Not businesses that specialise in debt. They outsource that part, and that part outsources too. "More prudent" means credit rating standards, or (usually) higher interest rate. That's not doing anything useful, IMO. You still get left with as much or more defaults, lawless collection, etc.
IMO, if when we want to actually deal with something, we drop the grand ideas and operate at the level of the issue we want to affect. Where there are multiple "orders," we want to tightly control the "chain."
Lawlessness in debt collection? Law enforcement. IP trolls abusing the legal system. Make it illegal.
Look... Google, FB and such had IP laws specially tailored to them. Timed and written to shield them from legitimate copyright infringement claims, taking into account their ability to "implement IP" without interfering with their business too much. Where is the law for the person in OP's shoes? It doesn't exist. He has to suffice with the print paradigm that existed before www.
Not-incidentally, the "print paradigm" was tailored for newspapers. That's what fair use is. It's not some abstract concept that happened to work for news. It was designed for them, probably by them. Copyright just isn't designed to work for ordinary people, so once you have incidents like this posts'... the realistic thing to do is avoid being a copyright user at all.
If you want a clever law expected to make debt valued <X% impossible to profitably collect, make it dumb. You probably need an institution of some sort to control that second order, or a willingness to make blanket laws that harm other participants that aren't your target. Consider the RL structure of consumer lending, not a chalkboard model.
Disney, Google, or the think tanks they fund to develop laws... they're certainly looking for a tightly controlled cause-effect chain with built in guarantees.
That may make the very, very bottom tier of borrowers unable to borrow--maybe--but it doesn't prevent the vast amount of borrowers from getting a loan. It just makes it more expensive.
A whole chapter could be written about turning (other peoples) images into executables and assert ownership with a new kind of DRM.
If you'd spend any time at all looking at midjourney creations, there's no way you can conclude that there's any significant amount of "ripping off" people's work. Certainly not in all or most cases.
With the right prompt you might be able to get something that looks eerily similar to an existing work, or artist style, but hardly anyone is interested in doing that, except for memes which are by definition modified and transformative. Nobody wants to AI-generate a mimic of a copyrighted work. If they wanted to do that, they'd just rip off the original work.
None of this is a new issue. The Warhol case even resolved one remaining facet. If you take an original work and apply photoshop filters to it, or do the equivalent manually or with AI, that doesn't alleviate the copyright compliance burden. The fuzzy area is how similar something has to be to fall under copyright; that'll remain subjective until the law or courts resolve it or copyright collapses entirely under its own weight, but the vast majority of AI generated content is nowhere close.
They were trained on work of people who didn't consent to it, the authors were not compensated, and currently are losing money (demand for their work) because of it. How is that not ripping off.
Please don't compare software to people. They're not similar legally, morally or in any other meaningful way.
Copyright is not about consent to use. It's about consent to copy.
You're confusing copyright with licensing, where, for instance, I pay amazon to contractually license me an electronic copy of a book.
AI companies did not enter into and then violate contracts with anyone for the material they used to train. Some of them may have run afoul of ordinary copyright law to acquire the content in the first place.[1] Even supposing they did, that act is the violation; it wouldn't subsequently be an additional violation to train an AI using those works, instead of keeping the works around on a storage array, as long as it wasn't redistributed.
The alternative to AI models currently at issue—created by OpenAI Midjourney StabilityAI Meta Alphabet et al from a corpus of partly openly available content and partly content of dubious provenance—is not some license scheme where creators get compensated equitably. The real alternative is for companies like Disney and Adobe and book publishers and record labels to band together and have their own paywalled AI models and extract rent from that forever, which would still be sufficient to saturate the market for imagined content, and would still kill demand for everyone else's work.
[1] I'm skeptical, though open-minded, about this. I'm not aware of any successful lawsuits, or any lawsuits at all, targeting defendants who only downloaded copyrighted content from pirate sources, as long as they did not upload or re-upload at all. There might have been, and probably were sometimes, threatening letters sent to people's ISPs. Threatening letters don't mean anything at all.
And copyright applies to every copy, not just when you download something to train the model. It also applies every time you make a copy with said model.
I wonder whether Twitter users are really legally liable for copyright violation in tweets they retweet, or whether the enforcers just believe they can get away with it.
I suppose it might differ from one jurisdiction to another. Are enforcers of this kind usually in the same jurisdiction as the supposed infringer?
However, doesn't Twitter itself add images in some cases (especially where a user tweet a link, but probably also retweets of an image)? If Twitter still does that, does it suggest Twitter itself isn't being targeted for enforcement? If so, is that only because enforcers prefer smaller prey?
Anyway, best of luck to you and your wife!
If the users are sufficiently anonymised, or share accounts, prosecution might be difficult, but I'm not sure that makes them any less liable. I don't imagine that accounts themselves could be prosecuted, but I'm not a lawyer.
Some observers saw opportunity in these; and there are now more than enough providers of Royalty / DMCA Free Music.
This was the problem I ran across in 2020, which I detailed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004892. Public domain hymns were being claimed, and they simply ignored my disputes so that they lapsed in my favour after 30 days, but next time we used the same hymn it still got automatically claimed and I had to dispute it again. They should have lost the ability to claim at least those hymns, and preferably just been booted from the platform for dishonesty (copy fraud).
(Remember that this site is considered a publishing business, they don't have the same luxuries when it comes to blocking visitors that individual have)
But only if the copyright troll wins yeah?
I gave it a try just then and the results tended towards cool-looking sunsets, reflective puddles, big dramatic stormy clouds and trees in bloom.
I think this is a result of selecting images for how aesthetic they are, and you could probably train a model on more average-looking pictures to get more realistic results.
They already made the "not quite right" to be the normal one on the internet.
I think legal/contractual/economic structure is going to determine things, not human preferences. Preferences evolve.
Why does an event need an image in the first place? Just don’t bother with one if you care so little about what it looks like.
I wonder what people living off selling photos think about that.
It may also be trolling in that it's not the photographer making the claim, but some company that buys rights specifically to do this kind of bulk demand.
Finally there is a sense that it is a very minor infringement - one where there would never have been a chance of a photographer making money off it in the first place. I don't think this is really a good justification, but might make the site a bit more miffed about the demands.
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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/troll... trolling noun [U] (FISHING)
the act of trying to catch fish by pulling a baited line through the water behind a boat:
there's plenty of high quality photo on unsplash anyway, and people really ought to know the difference instead of playing ignorant.
A good side effects is that it is starting to sink in for website maintainers that, yeah, you cannot just pick the first photo that is convenient for you.
Personally, I think image trolls (and most copywrite complaintants in general) can get fucked.
> Personally, I think image trolls (and most copywrite complaintants in general) can get fucked.
Actually, it's "copyright"
As in the "right" to "copy" something.
When Patrick McHardy [1] did "GPL enforcement", his goal wasn't to help bring people into enforcement, but to extract money from inevitable mistakes and oversights. Organizations trying to follow the spirit of the law but accidentally violating the letter of the law were lured into restrictive contracts and then punished for minor infractions. This is trolling: using the legal system to intimidate and extract money for minor infractions.
A proper "enforcement" interaction in this case, which was actually trying to make the system work well for everyone involved, would look like this:
Enforcer to website: "You seem to have image X; do you have a license?"
Website: "I got the image from the marketing department of Y; they said their license covered it."
Enforcer to Y: "It seems you gave image X to organization Z for their website; but your license only covers you to use the image on posters. If you want to use the image for partner websites, please upgrade to the version of the license which allows this, or pay this one-off license fee."
Y: "Oh yes, sorry about that; here you go."
Photographer is paid for their image, innocent people don't end up paying fines for simple mistakes; the system works for everyone involved.
[1] https://opensource.com/article/17/8/patrick-mchardy-and-copy...
I've helped one client who had been targeted by infringement notices for photos they own. In the process of helping them, I did some research into what's going on.
What happens is that Photographers supply their content library to a company that promises to defend their images against unauthorized distribution and collect appropriate licensing fees.
The problem is this:
1) these companies are very aggressive 2) they use some form of image matching search to detect image copies 3) the notices sent out are automated 4) the notices demand fees or legal action will be taken 5) there is no one to talk to or explain anything too 6) it's automated, abusive and often just plain inaccurate
This approach is very stressful for clients who haven't done anything wrong and dont understand what is happening. In some cases they have no control over an image that is published but attributed to them.
So yes, they are Trolls.
This isn't honest creatives defending their work.
In my clients case they had legitimately taken a very similar photo of a very popular public tourist attraction. Fortunately I was able to connect with the original photographer, and eventually, get them to call off their dogs.
Yes, I used the term troll from my background many years ago writing about patent trolls, so maybe it irks people, but people who complain about one word in a much longer article are maybe... missing the point.
Anyway, as you will probably notice from the article, I am not "picking the first photos that is convenient", but being sent the banner images etc by event organisers to promote their events.
Yes, I can go back with a form for them to fill in and confirm they have copyright clearance etc., and doubtless they'll check, and confirm they have from photo agency X, and maybe I should also check that the photo agency has issued clearance, and that they themselves have validated that the photographer has verified they definetly took the photos... etc etc etc.
You can see that there has to be a point at which you accept that someone in the chain is being honest.
The issue isn't me nicking photos that are convenient, but accepting that a photo sent to me to use in an article/event listing has been cleared by the PR/marketing dept that is sending it to me.
The majority of problems come from small orgs who may seem to lack an awareness of copyright, so to protect myself, I am now taking the decision not to use their images unless I have built up trust in the sender.
However, even large orgs have been caught out - one example was the large theatre that paid for a license to use an image in a marketing poster, only for the stock agency to object to it being used on my website because the license (weirdly) only permitted use in their publications and no where else.
That's a large org trying to do the right thing, and I am trying to do the right thing, and still getting hammered by... well, yes, they're copyright trolls.
Well, not really. The contract you propose will merely give this guy the right to sue his client. He'll still directly owe the moeny to the person making the copyright claim, because that's how liability works.
What I want to know is -- what would stop a photographer anonymously uploading his entire portfolio to Wikimedia and then suing them for publishing all his images?
What is weird about that? You can buy the licence cheaply with restrictions and you can also pay much more for a less restricted version.
This makes perfect sense, if anyone who licences a picture could freely re-licence it to anyone then the original creator could only sell a licence once therefore they would have to ask much more for that licence to be able to make a living.
> people who complain about one word in a much longer article are maybe... missing the point
I don’t think so. The complaint goes to the hearth of the article. You cannot complain about people enforcing their copyright and at the same breath admit that they are right. If they are right then they are not copyright trolls.
Now if you would tell us a story where one of these people were trying to shake you down for an image you clearly and evidently had the copyright for that would be a different story. But your story as told undermines the phrase you are using, which is the core of the article.
As it reads you are chaffing that you have been ripping off people’s work (without intending to) and now they found an avenue to complain to you.
> I can go back with a form for them to fill in and confirm they have copyright clearance etc.
That is not what the form should say. What it should say is that they (named organisation if you trust them to be around, or named individual if you don’t trust the organisation) will pay any copyright fines you receive in relation to the images they gave you. This is a contract between you and them, so talk with a lawyer to make sure it can be enforced and has all the right elements.
Why? If they are good enough that people choose to use them in their publications then why do you assert this?
I think part of this problem is that the assumed value of an image is practically 0. Conversely any YouTuber from some rural backwater will make sure there is no copyright music playing in the background of anything they intend to release because they know that it has non-0 value. The reason this changed is because people became more collectively aware of the consequences. The long term consequences are that people will ensure they have the appropriate permissions before using a photo. Even if this means paying a nearly negligible amount for access to collections of millions of photos like happens with music now.
So it's plausible that the organisers did get a license that allows this.
It's also plausible that they thought they were getting a license that allowed this.
Ultimately though, it seems the photographer had been paid at least once.
Further, in this case, it seems to me the onus should be on the organiser sending out the images intended to be used to promote the event, to make sure they have a license to do that, not on the individual websites. How are they supposed to confirm the copyright of an image, other than what they are told by the supplier of that image?
Every once in awhile you just have to lol.
But that's not what he did. He used the artwork his client supplied.
I'm trying to understand how this works. E.g. what is their business model, is this something that would be used by individual photographers, by agencies or by corporations, etc
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...