Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: A year in illustration, 2023 edition (21 Dec 2023)"
pilkun (“of a comma”) + nussija (“fucker”) (wiktionary.com)
As I processed yesterday’s news about Flickr updating its policies to prevent “copyleft trolls” from using its service to snare unsuspecting internet users and hit them for hundreds or thousands of dollars in “copyright settlement” fees, I began reflecting on why this phenomenon makes me so furious.
I’ve been blogging for more than 20 years. I’ve been an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more than 20 years, too. I’ve also been a Creative Commons user for more than 20 years. And I’ve been a novelist for more than 20 years.
Continue reading "Commafuckers Versus The Commons"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Flickr to copyleft trolls: drop dead (01 Apr 2023)"
In January, I published an article describing how a company called Pixsy sent me repeated legal threats in a bid to get me to pay $600 for a Creative Commons image I’d used. Pixsy falsely claimed that I had violated the Creative Commons license by failing to correctly attribute it to its creator, the photographer Nenad Stojkovic. After I challenged them on this, they apologized and withdrew the threats, but refused to answer any of my questions about how this happened or how their business operates (Stojkovic also failed to answer multiple messages seeking clarification).
Continue reading "An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats"
Here’s a supreme irony: the Creative Commons licenses were invented to enable a culture of legally safe sharing, spurred by the legal terror campaign waged by the entertainment industry, led by a literal criminal predator who is now in prison for sex crimes.
But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.
To make matters worse, this new kind of predator specifically targets people who operate in good faith, only using materials that they explicitly have been given permission to use.
What a mess.
Continue reading "A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator"