A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
doctorow.medium.com
doctorow.medium.com
For all I know, the law has effective sanctions against this practice, but I imagine there are ways of sending a first notice in a way that make it unlikely to be received - a typo in the address, or perhaps an email crafted so as to likely be classified as spam.
Sadly, depending on the specific country it happens in, a defendant might still have to pay significant legal fees just to reach a point where the judge can tell trolls to go away. And that's where the business model kicks in: the trolls will offer to go away on their own if defendant pays them $LikelyLegalFees / 2, making it cheaper than the alternative.
It's like the Kevin Bridges bus-stop joke: https://youtu.be/8W_k7ybGBDg
(I am not a lawyer, this is not a legal advice.)
The intent of the law is a big part of what courts deal with in Roman law/civil law countries too. In Norway statutes are typically fairly general leaving precision to preparatory works, Supreme Court precedent, administrative regulations and the courts. So the spirit and intent of the law is certainly a big thing in at least some non-Anglosphere legal systems.
See https://www.advokatforeningen.no/en/features-of-the-norwegia...
And the Anglosphere is hardly uniform in this respect, in particular in recent decades there has been a proliferation of detailed strict liability laws in England which restrict the courts abilities to interpret the law.
There's a concept known as "willful blindness" (at least in Canada) that covers what I believe you wanted as an example.
Not a lawyer.
Wow this is such an amazing and unethical scam. What do you do in a situation like this?
Make sure that when you are downloading or uploading anything, and I mean anything from the internet that you do it though VPNs or other services that place some barrier between you and copyright trolls. You don't need NSA-levels of security to avoid the trolls, just enough of a barrier that their automated tools cannot see you so easily.
If you run a website, generate all your own content. Don't use stock photos. FYI, film and TV have been dealing with the same issue for decades. It is normal on a film/TV set for there to be zero tolerance for anything that might be subject to copyright. Any painting on a wall will either be blurred or the film will commission a new painting. That is a healthy policy for any website: if you want a little drawing of a mouse, pay someone to create one for you. Don't pay 5$ for a stock image that may or may not be appropriately licensed.
Troll files bad faith lawsuit on behalf of Falcon Ltd. claiming S. Andworm infringed upon their copyright on multiple gay porn titles uploaded to TorrentSite. This stuff gets picked up by sites scraping dockets and resold as "background check" services.
You are now falsely associated with this content in an authoritative context. The suit will obviously fail but until then people will see a lawsuit was filed against you and by who. The scam works because nobody questions the legitimacy or sees it through to resolution.
"Fake and gay" has never described something so aptly.
There isn't much you can do about bad faith claims. Claimants either face no consequence for false reporting or are able to plausibly deny it.
That includes PeerTube and other decentralized video platforms, at least not without turning off WebRTC swarming.
The reason why this scam works is:
- The defamatory nature of the content in question (which can't be fixed by law). In other words, a lot of people don't want it people thinking they watch gay porn
- The up-to-$150k-per-infringement statutory damages authorized by the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, which just barely makes copyright litigation a profitable enterprise
- Inherent privacy vulnerabilities caused by P2P communications in a public swarm - i.e. the ability for anyone to obtain evidentiary proof that you downloaded the copyrighted fake gay porn
All of these factors are integral to the scam and it would fall apart if any one of them were removed. Take away the stigma regarding gay porn and nobody would settle. Take away the statutory damages and downloaders are only liable for the cost of a copy, if that, making copyright litigation against curious individuals completely unprofitable. And if the scammers hosted the content themselves (to get IP addresses), anyone could easily use historical DNS archival records to prove that the scammers hosted the content. If a copyright owner deliberately uploads their own content, the downloaders have an implied license to download it.
Or at least you could argue that as a credible legal defense. Remember that these scammers are only barely profitable because they encourage people to settle quickly. A lot of them would drop the case immediately if you even bothered to file a motion to dismiss. For this reason, the scammers would lie under penalty of perjury about the uploads being unauthorized, and once they got discovered they wound up going to jail for lying their ass off.
If you are one of the attorneys in that case, then you are found guilty of fraud and extortion, are sent to jail, are disbarred from the practice of law, and are forced to repay all of your proceeds from your scheme.
They didn't just upload gay porn in torrents, they intentionally infected those downloads with ransomware that would hold your whole computer hostage with legal threats demanding that you call the lawfirm and pay anywhere between $150,000 and $400,000. With the threatened alternative of releasing your name in public.
I personally witnessed this about three times. They were absolute bastards.
Snark aside, I fully agree, the company should be held accountable. I just don't know how much if they just "sent an email". I mean, this is gross :(
Finally that doesn't even get into CC-non-commercial which no one can agree what it means and that Creative Commons itself punted on defining in the latest license iteration.
Not directly relevant but this reminded me of an article I probably saw linked here a few years ago where two photographers took nearly identical photos and people on the internet accused both of them of stealing the other's work.
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/7338941576/how-two-photogr...
In terms of writing, someone I know was mildly miffed years back that I had taken an observation from one of his columns and used it for my own. A mutual acquaintance pointed out that my column had actually appeared first :-)
"It could get much, much worse. Rightsholder groups are backing a Copyright Office plan to make this kind of robosigning into law, forcing all online platforms to institute filters that automatically remove materials that an algorithm finds to be infringing, without human oversight or judgement."
Here's a link to that document in the Federal Register [0]. Public comments apparently closed on Feb. 8th, but it may be worth keeping an eye on.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/22/2021-27...
But yes, every couple of years people ask the Library of Congress to change copyright enforcement, so the battle of rule making never really ends.
It was flatly bad and wrong and did exactly the opposite of what it was promised to do--permit rights holders to let users share their work and attribute it. It tricked people into a legal trap of minutiae and put users at risk.
It was broken for nearly two decades.
An error or mistake that results in incorrect/undesired/unforeseen results not caught by the compiler. s/compiler/(lawyer|judge)/
They did err on the side of caution, to protect the contributor, but when doing so, they did not take into account that it might be abused as well.
Just my two cents.
This is sort of my general issue with Creative Commons.
First, it's not just about attribution as the term would be understood in many other contexts.
And then you have the Chinese menu of no-commercial and no-derivatives to encourage people who might otherwise hesitate to use CC to do so. But then those terms are ill-defined and people widely disagree on them.
Which he is rightfully doing - CC4.0 adds the "forced grace period" you find in a lot of other licenses, where there's basically a period of time between being in breach of the license and when the license gets revoked. Usually the way thats defined is that you have something like 30 days to "cure" the mistake once you're notified. Only after those 30 days do you lose the rights granted by the license itself.
It specifically exists to avoid this kind of copyright trolling, where a lawyer uses the complicated demands in the text of the license to make a mess of the intent behind it. The actual viability of that type of trolling is questionable (German courts threw it out for example), but the threat of legal fees can be too costly for most so it works as an extortion mechanism.
(The main notable variant of this is in pre-3.0 versions of the GPL, where the 30 days would start the moment you breached the license rather than being notified. 3.0 fixed that and I've seen people who prefer GPL2.0 often modify this term in specific to be more like GPL3.0 so they can avoid the headache.)
It’s been two years since this was published, has it become a widespread problem? I haven’t heard about copyleft trolls before so perhaps not?
And so many links are already dead. Linkrot is so quick sometimes.
I wish this was clarified. Like, why is Wikipedia allowed to do this? Is it because they're thumbnails?
> “This is not a scheme to make money. My clients are hurt immensely by copyright infringement and they are not going to make it worse by actually distributing their works on these networks,” he told us.
Yeah. Right. I guess mysterious strangers keep uploading that porn disguised as something else for no good reason. How did they find it themselves if it is mislabeled?
Even if they didn't upload it themselves, going after people who clearly did not mean to download gay porn and trying to shame them into submission is absolutely despicable leech-like behavior deserving of every bit of contempt. I do not understand how these people are able to exist in society. If it was my own father doing that, we'd have a falling out.
https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pi...
... and: if you wanted to just allow reuse we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain. CC requires attribution.
That means it requires attribution. Among other things. That is arguably the main point of CC over Public Domain.
So this is kinda working as intended? There are obviously literal malicious trolls (manipulative, or following the law but intentionally targeting the most vulnerable rather than the main violators), but the amount of companies flagrantly violating these licenses is extreme and I don't feel any sympathy for them. Grabbing images off Google without researching their license is a fast track to getting sued, and it should be. That's the crux of any "don't steal from artists" and "exposure is not payment" argument.
Name the creator (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users)
Provide a URL for the work (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users)
Name the license
Provide a URL for the license
Note whether the work has been modified
So a very normal photo credit like "CC photo by John Smith" is actually not appropriate Creative Commons attribution.
There's an enormous pattern of "it's okay to use X if I say it's not mine" both individually and commercially and it's not okay. The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. Commercial entities that don't hard-require every image posted to their blog to be either new or come from e.g. Getty are willingly playing fast and loose and hoping they don't get sued.
Not-for-profit individuals (e.g. personal blog posts) making an attempt at attribution: yeah I think the vast majority are entirely fine with that, but would lightly prefer accurate attribution, and targeting them is a troll act.
Is that a majority of violators and CC creators? ... I don't know. Possibly? Should trolls be targeting them? Heck no. Does the 30 day grace period allow companies to willingly violate this and only fix it after they've made their profit and have nothing to lose, and the creator nothing to gain? Yes absolutely.
If you actually don't care about attribution, distribute under Public Domain and ask for attribution when you think it's worthwhile. Many will likely say yes - I've seen loads of public domain images used with attribution. People like public domain contributions.
If you do care, legal teeth are kinda required, and choosing CC means explicitly choosing legal teeth.
I mostly disagree. As I recall early discussions, it was more rooted in enabling remix culture while ensuring creatives received appropriate credit.
If direct monetization is the main consideration, I don't know why you'd use Creative Commons at all.
---
I should probably clarify that I think a lot of these are coming from people who want to do more of their art, and that requires money, and many of them have been tricked into exposure rather than payment and that leads to them not doing more art because they're too busy with other stuff that does pay so they can live. It's a time bomb that isn't generally recognized until it explodes, and it almost always does, and then they care deeply and go looking for legal teeth.
Exposure can be great. It's overwhelmingly exploited by companies that are capable of paying but choose not to. Changing that is why licenses have terms like this, otherwise what's the point of the license? Make it Public Domain.
Fully agree.
In a prior stint as an IT industry analyst, we eventually started a non-paywall blog and (rarely) did free appearances at industry conferences. But people tried to get us to do free stuff all the time for the "exposure."
Especially starting out it can be really tempting. But you have to really keep it in check if you're running a business.
>Seems like that "remix, please attribute" is just signaling intent, and then there's no need for a license dictating how violations are handled.
Viewed from the distance of 20ish years the CC licenses (other than CC0) look way too complicated. And it's not like CC works are routinely credited, even if imperfectly, anyway. It's not even clear to me that the MIT license couldn't just have been used (or extended) for non-code use.
Public Domain isn't a license. It's a problematic legal concept. It's not clear whether you actually can place something into the public domain if it isn't in there automatically (for example being published pre-1922). Sure, you can say "I place this work in the public domain", but will that actually have the legal effect you want? Basically you are saying you relinquish ownership of the work, but if you don't own it, you can't claim to control what other people do with it--including claiming ownership of it under other legal concepts, such as the concept of "abandoned property"--if you find something lying around and nobody else claims ownership of it, you can. "Public Domain" gives no shield whatever against such shenanigans.
Fair. I'll keep that in mind and try to find details for the future :)
>[Under public domain] you can't claim to control what other people do with it
Which is exactly what CC without actual legal threats achieves, yes. Which is why I say people do care, so making it toothless seems to defeat the point.
As far as I'm aware, the rest of that (mostly ownership) is covered by copyright, which is applied by default if you say nothing.
So: saying nothing and distributing it however you like already achieves more than CC-without-teeth because you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to.
Which is why this whole change feels self-defeating to me.
But does not allow reuse. So it's irrelevant to a discussion of what to do if you do want to allow reuse.
> you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to
But that puts anyone who wants to reuse your content in good faith at the mercy of your whim about whether or not to sue them. That is not a good basis for facilitating reuse.
> this whole change feels self-defeating to me
Meaning, fixing the attribution clauses in CC so that people have a reasonable time to cure violations before the $150K lawsuit threat? I don't see how that makes CC licenses any more or less "toothless" than they were before. It increases the difficulty of copyleft trolling, which was what it was intended to do. Yes, it means a 30 day delay after you give notice before you can sue someone for violating your license--but anyone who fixes the violation within 30 days of you giving them notice is not someone you want to sue anyway, because they're a good faith user.
If we're talking about individuals or small businesses, what makes any license toothless in our current legal environment is the cost of a lawsuit. If you're an individual or small business and large corporation X reuses your content without meeting the terms of your license, whether it's the original CC or the current one, and refuses to fix the violation (presumably because it would be bad for their business), you're basically SOL anyway: you will run out of money to keep a lawsuit going long before corporation X runs out of legal devices to delay or obstruct you. No amount of rejiggering of a license is going to change that. Nor, for that matter, will not giving any license and relying on copyright law: you're still in the same position.
> The original version of the CC license stated that the license would “terminate automatically upon any breach.” That meant that if you failed to live up to the license terms in any substantial way, you were no longer a licensed user of the copyrighted work. Any uses you had made of that work were no longer permitted under the license, so unless you had another basis for using it (for example, if your use qualified as “fair use”), then you were now infringing copyright. Recall that “willful” copyright infringement carries a statutory penalty of $150,000. [Copyleft trolls say:] we’ll find people who made minor errors in their use of your Creative Commons works, and then send them a speculative invoice for a “license,” on threat of a copyright lawsuit that could run them $150 grand plus legal fees.
So if you have a bluray movie for sale, you'd have to pull copies, and reissue edited without the image. Art would have to be taken off the walls. Logos rebranded.
Otherwise it would be wilful.
And I believe it is per infringement?
Then they go to you and say hey, it'll cost you this many thousand dollars to hire a lawyer and defend against this lawsuit in court -- even if you win. Or, you can just pay a fraction of that right now and it will all go away.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee... (this name is deceptive as it is basically the "every western democracy except the USA" rule)
If you do not receive an answer, you are not dealing with someone who is serious about taking you to court.
If you do receive an answer, you should immediately check whether that person is actually licensed to practice law (you can usually check online). If not, report to the relevant bar association that [name] is presenting themselves as licensed to practice law (don't be spooky, send the full details to the bar association).
Only if you are put in contact with an actual lawyer should you waste any energy thinking about this further.
>If not, report to the relevant bar association that [name] is presenting themselves as licensed to practice law (don't be spooky, send the full details to the bar association).
In the US, at least, are people not allowed to represent themselves as their own counsel?
In the US, to be an attorney, one needs to pass the state's bar in the relevant area of law that one would practice.
> In the US, at least, are people not allowed to represent themselves as their own counsel?
Sure they can. But they can't say "I'm an attorney." That's what OP is getting at.
For more context -- In the US, anyone can sue anyone for any reason. However, that doesn't mean it's going to be a valid or even successful suit. Except in small claims court, representing yourself in a legal situation is an absolutely terrible idea. Not only will you most certainly loose the suit for not following the proper legal procedures (pesky things like having an actual legal argument, presenting valid evidence, citing relevant laws and case precedents, understanding the opposing counsel's legal argument, evidence, citations, etc.) you could easily get yourself into a situation where you'd be wasting so much time and resources by fucking up that you could be slapped with a fine yourself! Or, let's say you're in court, have no idea what you're doing, and get so frustrated you start becoming unreasonable -- contempt of court, put into jail until you calm down.
tl;dr You can't say you're an attorney if you're not one, that's a crime (fraud). If you interact with the legal system without an attorney, you're going to get screwed. :)
All true of course. However, that is not how I read it. It said put me in touch with your counsel. If their answer is "I am my own counsel" then your take is that this is a crime?
Of course, I understand if they say "I am an attorney" and they are not. But that is not what is being said. It reads like a grimy way for a bigger business to try to "trap" people without as many resources.
> PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. This e-mail, its contents, and attachments are private and confidential and is intended for the recipient only. Any disclosure, copying or unauthorized use of such information is prohibited.
Can someone with knowledge comment on this practice? Are these just empty words? Or is it legally enforceable to send an email and forbid "copying" or publishing/disclosing the contents?
Yes. Without some kind of existing contract in place, they're meaningless.
> Or is it legally enforceable to send an email and forbid "copying" or publishing/disclosing the contents?
Only in extremely rare circumstances. It can be legally useful to put a note saying "Hey, this email contains trade secrets. If it was accidentally sent to you, you might want to think twice about further disseminating or selling these trade secrets." But the case law on this is quite weak, and putting the disclaimer on every email even if they don't contain trade secrets may be counter-productive by diluting the claim even in cases where it actually would apply. It's debatable but many legal scholars would assume similarly for a disclaimer on every single email saying "This is attorney-client privileged." unless maybe your business is a law firm.
https://about.usps.com/publications/pub300a/pub300a_v04_revi...
I'm not sure that it has been applied to email, but that would make for some very interesting cases. (Is Intellectual Property merchandise? Rights assigned to the content of the message?)
IANAL. However I find that with law, you can just imagine how sociopaths would abuse a system. If you don't see that happening, then that's not how the system works.
> READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
So if such signatures are enforceable then his signature is too, which nullifies the whole thing.
I'd assume that's unenforceable. You agree something by agreeing it, not just by reading the text of the agreement. How can you agree something you haven't yet finished reading?
Anyone arguing that it is invalid and unenforceable is arguing to invalidate their own, equally unenforceable ‘private and confidential’ note at the bottom of their original emails.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Neither. The purpose of this language isn’t to bind the recipient; it’s to guard against claims that the sender waived privilege.
> “inadvertent disclosure” of privileged material does not operate as a waiver so long as (i) the privilege holder took “reasonable steps to prevent disclosure”; and (ii) the privilege holder took “reasonable steps to rectify the error.”
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...
If you send me an unsolicited email, you can't bind me legally by appending a stack of demands and requirements. Much the same would apply to printed correspondence sent by post. I am not bound by your demands unless I have signed a contract with you to that effect. Random lawyers can't impose conditions on me just by writing to me.
So yes, they're empty words, like a lot of what lawyers write.
/me not a lawyer.
To be overly verbose is neither.
1. What the old clause of the license was 2. What kind of unintended side effect it had 3. What the new clause addressing this is
Summing up those 3 points results in a clear paragraph of maybe 5 to 10 lines. Meanwhile I challenge anyone who hasn't read it to extract that content from the article in less than 15 minutes.
This sentence is 1087 words in. That's a long "light introduction".