It turns out that there is a flaw in early versions of some of the Creative Commons (CC) series of copyright licenses.
They are to allow content creators to specify the level of sharing possible with a relative fine granularity.
Unfortunately, some of the earlier versions of the license, relatively minor errors in attributions can be construed as terminating the licenses, and some so-called, "Copyleft Trolls," have been exploiting this in order to extort money.
The photograph sharing app Flikr has rolled out a policy that these trolls are to be immediately and permanently banned from the site.
Sic Semper Copyright and Patent Trolls:
Today's a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.
First things first: Flickr's new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: "Failure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed."
https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines
If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, here's how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:
https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404057906068-How-to-report-Community-Guidelines-violations
Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses "terminate automatically upon any breach" – that is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299
Core to the CC licenses is the idea of attribution. When you use a Creative Commons image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users don't understand this; they use an image and add something like "Image: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commons" with no links or specific licenses.
Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a "breach" which "terminates" the CC license. That's where the copyleft trolls come in.
Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.
………
But after Flickr was sold to Yahoo, it joined Yahoo's haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahoo's bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to Verizon, who neglected them still further.
An abandoned ship is easy picking for the rats that live in its bilges. Pixsy and its photographers actually became official Flickr partners, pitching themselves as a way for photographers who didn't want their images shared to hunt down infringers – even as they facilitated a revolting campaign of copyleft trolling that depended on Flickr as their base of operations.
The depravity of copyleft trolls is truly boundless. Take Marco Verch, a prolific copyleft troll who hosts nearly 47,000 photos on Flickr. Verch hires low-waged gig work photographers through platforms like Upwork to take photos, then harasses people who make minor attribution errors:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252488167/Automated-image-recognition-How-using-free-photos-on-the-internet-can-lead-to-lawsuits-and-fines
Verch boasts that his predation lets him work for four hours a week, leaving him with ample time to focus on his hobby, running. Verch is a truly prolific predator, and his attacks have made untold numbers of victims miserable – including the small Dutch charity that was forced to shut down after paying his ransom demand. Pixsy has been Verch's US counsel and filed dozens of suits on his behalf.
………
The reason I thought Flickr might take this in hand is that it is finally under decent, responsive leadership – since 2018, Flickr has been owned by Smugmug, a family-owned business that really cares about photographers and the open internet.
Flickr hasn't taken all of my suggestions yet – my understanding is that they are laboring under enormous technological debt thanks to years of neglect by Yahoo and Verizon, and even small changes require weeks of all-hands technological work.
But what they have done is modify their policies to create a de facto CC 4.0 environment for their users, by promising to terminate the accounts of any user who repeatedly threatens legal action over bad attribution strings without first offering a 30-day grace period.
Flickr's done more than that, actually. For one thing, they ditched Pixsy, severing their relationship with the company (Pixsy still lists them on its "partner" page). They also created the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to providing long-term, responsible stewardship for their CC and public domain image respositories:
I know that I frequently sound like I am implacably opposed to all forms of exclusive licensing, whether though copyright, patent, or trademark. I am not.
But I do understand that the current IP regimes have lost their way. The purpose of Copyright and Patent is public interest, specifically to, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts," while trademark's purpose is primarily to protect consumers from being defrauded.
By elevating limited time exclusive licenses to the level of eternal property without any exception does not serve the public good.
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