WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46861822

(no title)

lefstathiou | 27 days ago

Someone tried to shake our company down once. They posted all this stock imagery on the web, waited for someone to use it with an ambiguously worded attribution policy, then have a third party chase you down and demand $100k but will settle for $5k.

It turns out we did attribute the right way (in our terms of use) and could prove it with logs of when we added the language and when it was removed after we removed the image, but I am sure they nail people all the time with this strategy. This didnt stop them from sending 20 emails, demand lawyers get on the phone, etc.

There are a couple of similar scams like this out there.

discuss

order

arjie|27 days ago

Oh that's a classic trick. It's been going on for decades. One example I am particularly familiar with is that of Larry Philpot / User:Nightshooter on Wikimedia Commons. He would upload his photos there with an addendum on how he should be attributed. Any slight impression in the attribution would be followed by legal action. It was obviously a copyright troll mechanism and now all of his photos on Wikimedia Commons have forced attribution affixed by users that warns others that he sues people.

His stuff is so widespread that the consensus on Wikimedia Commons was to keep his photos and add a warning so that no one ends up accidentally using it. Some accused him of sock-puppetry to get his content into a place.

Today, intellectual property maximalism is a much more mainstream position so perhaps modern Internet users will think that he is in the right, but I think it's a bit much.

Here's the thread where he's discussed: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27...

Here's an example forced-attribution photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg

jeltz|27 days ago

Could he ever win a case in court? At least the Swedish legal system is based a lot around common sense and good faith and such a trap would likely end up with the one who sued having to pay the legal costs for both parties.

foxglacier|27 days ago

His cases that I could find are where the company republishing his photos didn't attribute them to him at all so it seems fair to sue (except when it turned out to be fair use). What is this attribution error you mentioned? CC BY-SA 3.0 is pretty onerous "You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made." All 3 things are required. Maybe every CC-BY photographer should be suing newspapers for stealing their work, shouldn't they?

arjie|27 days ago

I was curious about this a few years ago so I took a look around and found another case, the one of Thomas Wolf / User:Der_Wolf_im_Wald, but this guy seems to be getting away with it because he has a 'no-derivatives' box on the image page. He has the same modus operandi:

1. Post the photo to Wikimedia Commons

2. Mark it CC-BY or derivative (say CC-BY-SA etc.)

3. Have a highly precise attribution clause

4. Sue everyone who uses it without the specific attribution

The funny thing about this copyleft troll is that Someone Who Is Not Him creates accounts on Reddit (e.g. this one[0]) that post exclusively about how they made a mistake and the photographer was well within his rights to sue and you should take him very seriously and negotiate the amount.

> We actually violated copyright law before he wrote to us. So it was our mistake and we apologized for that.

I really should create a List page for this on my personal wiki so I can remember all these guys. I find this kind of behavior galling.

People did bring up this stuff here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Der_Wolf_im_Wal.....

But since I don't speak German well enough and inevitably this is going to end up in such a situation where you have to, I think it best I don't pursue deletion here. Hopefully a German speaker will see fit, referencing the other cases here.

0: https://www.reddit.com/user/No_Significance7032/

zem|27 days ago

I am honestly flabbergasted that his pictures weren't expunged with great prejudice. what is the value they add to wikimedia that makes being associated with this sort of sleaze okay?