Pluralistic: AI is a WMD (09 May 2024)


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Pluralistic: Flickr to copyleft trolls: drop dead (01 Apr 2023)


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An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Image: Tobias Bomm, CC BY 2.0 (modified)

Background

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).

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Pluralistic: 31 Jan 2022


Nenad Stojkovic, CC BY 2.0, modified/Ed Webster, CC BY 2.0.

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A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator

Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.

A hand on a multibutton mouse, the body behind it is blurred and out-of-focus; a larger “DANGER” label in red, white and black, has been superimposed over it. Nenad Stojkovic (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand_on_the_computer_mouse_-_50202556601.jpg CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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.

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