Originally published at: Rise of the copyleft predator | Boing Boing
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Damn convoluted way to make a buck.
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Nice to hear from @doctorow here.
Also,
Among those scaling up the scam is a company which sends automated legal threats based on image search results. Unfortunately for that startup, it picked a poor target for a shakedown: Cory Doctorow.
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Oh Shit, that was my grade school teacher’s “go to” line. You knew you were in some deep shit when that came out.
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Ah, but also a good target for a “Please come back, we miss you” card!
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Doesn’t matter if one of their targets was a bad choice, as long as they also find easier marks.It’s like Nigeria letters, you don’t have to fool everyone, just a few.
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I actually started registering my most-infringed images with Pixsy a year or so back, as using a cross-promotion with my paid Flickr account it gave me the option to let someone else chase down the most egregious misuses of my photographs.
A few pages into checking through the uses it came up with, I gave up. They were almost all of them little blogs that nobody particularly cared about. Most of them had attempted to credit me correctly, and the few that hadn’t were not big fish out to extract too much financial gain from my work.
Wasn’t worth the bother in the end, I figured.
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True, but the both the Prenda Law (copyright troll) and Personal Law LLC (patent troll) were eventually taken down because they either cast too wide a net or caught fishies that were bigger than they could land. Fishies that knew their rights and how to email the EFF.
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Thank you @beschizza for pointing to this. That was a long and very worthwhile read. Cory can really write engaging material.
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Yep, agree. I miss him here too. I read through this whole thing, like I do with his Pluralistic daily newsletter.
His piece ended with an attribution to the image he used, and I’m very confident that it was done correctly with every T crossed. Very nice and well done, @doctorow !
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Using a long-obsolete copyleft licence, especially manually added, should be evidence of some kind of malicious intent.
If only the courts worked that way.
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I was hoping he’d say he sicked the EFF’s lawyers on them to really make them wet the bed and get the photographer involved, since it’s likely he had nothing to do with this clown show, and sue them into a smoking hole.
What a mess indeed.
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In a lot of cases, the courts do work that way, but it’s so expensive to get to that point that it’s cheaper just to pay up…and so the cycle continues.
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