(C) BoingBoing
Author Name: BoingBoing
This story was originally published on Boingboing.net. [1]
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.[2]


Rise of the copyleft predator

2022-01-26 00:00:00

Cory Doctorow reports on the "copyleft predator," a new breed of troll who uses obsolete Creative Commons licenses as legal boobytraps to snare publishers who think they're doing the right thing.

Creative Commons users really don't get this, by and large — neither the technical requirements for attribution nor the potential risk of getting it wrong. I have posted more than 28,000 photos to Flickr under very generous CC licenses and I'm constantly finding users who have failed to correctly attribute them. Like, I've repeated emailed the contact address for "Fintech Zoom" to request that they fix the attribution on this photo and all I get is crickets. I see that failure to correctly attribute as a minor annoyance, but copyleft trolls see it as a payday.

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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[1] URL: https://boingboing.net/2022/01/26/rise-of-the-copyleft-predator.html
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

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