As a software engineer with a keen interest in photography, I've been using a method to allow others to benefit from my work, while also enjoying the spread of my photos in various public forums. I upload my pictures to Flickr and tag them with a Creative Commons license. This makes it easy for anyone to search and use these images without worrying about licensing fees; they just need to provide a link back to the original source.
This practice has brought me a lot of joy over the years. My photos have appeared on Wikipedia, in concert promotions, and even in a special Ibiza edition of Monopoly. The Monopoly team didn't have to, but they sent me two copies of the game as a thank-you, which was a lovely touch.
For those of you who are like-minded and have photos that could be of public interest, consider setting a Creative Commons license on platforms like Flickr. Doing so could ease the burden for small publishers like ianVisits, allowing them to use high-quality images without worrying about legal repercussions.
Photographers using these kinds of copyright enforcement services are only hurting themselves in the long run. Most aren’t going to risk multiple thousands of pounds worth of fines for a few content images. They’ll switch to AI-generated content, or won’t use images at all, and licensing revenue will eventually decline.
If these enforcement services were legitimate entities instead of parasitic trolls, they would start by providing the infringer with options to either remove the image or purchase a royalty free license at a reasonable price, and only impose punitive fees if they continued to infringe.
Maybe, but "photographers" aren't really a collective... or too loose a collective to have foresight, interests and such.
The credit industry, traditionally, has a cascade of debt collection tiers. Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt. The value of the debt (asset, to the collector) decreases drastically as we travel down the tiers. The "quality" of collectors also decreases. Business models that depend on illegal practices, betting on inadequate enforcement. Trial preparations that depend on 99% certainty of defendant not showing up. Most of the debt might be arbitrarily imposed interest and fines to nonresponsive "clients." The lawyer present may not have paperwork, or even know the companies' originally owed.
Financial assets like bad debt portfolios scale and bundle wonderfully, so there's no floor. There are multi-million dollar packages out there selling for $1000. An enterprising individual might take a blind chance. Apply creative means of collecting 1.3% of total debt. Maybe you offer 90% settlements. Maybe impose 500% fees and sell on. Maybe you specialise in deceased estates, acquire high morbidity debtor lists, and use systemic timing to advantge. Maybe you rebunde such that specialists can have a crack.
Anyway... At the copyright trolling end of this game, I'd make a distinction between "photographers," "rights holders" and the "copyright biz." What some shady lawtech startup does to monetize a copyright portfolio owned by their pay-per-performance client... "Photographer" is not really an active category within this structure.
> Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt
I think there should be a law stating that if your debt is sold to a third party and you are not offered to settle with the same amount than the third party was paying, the debt should be automatically forgiven. Yep, that would make many loans more difficult to issue, and that would be net good.
Maybe. I mean, it might makes moral sense maybe. IRL, these things play out in unsatisfying ways.
"that would make many loans more difficult to issue"
Maybe in some cases, but I'm broadly skeptical. Selling bad debt is usually not an important part of non-shady businesses models. 2nd order effects, if any, are likely to be the main concern. If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.
Honestly, I think the debt stuff (also aspects of copyright) are just the loose ends of major industries. Most bad debt or long tail IP assets aren't worth much. But if you can bundle, they're never too small to monetize.
Once you have an industry dedicated to squeezing that last drop... you probably have a destructive industry.
IMO, the best solutions is policing. Somehow, policing is rarely mentioned as a solution to corporate crime. That might mean occasionally tweaking laws to help make policing effective... but that only makes sense ifyou are already policing.
I bet these trolls are as sloppy as the victims they're targeting. At least in debt collection, at a certain depth... they're not doing any due diligence. Often, all they have is a name, number and sum. That means they often are collecting on BS premises. Charge them with fraud, or racketeering. A business practice premised on demanding payment of a debt, without proof that the debt is real... that's an extortion racket.
I wonder if the trolls here can stand up to scrutiny. Do they actually own the rights? Have they based their business model on strategic avoidance of due diligence? From what I've heard, IP trolling exists by exploiting liability limits of both corporate law, and practical law enforcement.
> If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.
Yep. And the next order effect is that the business stops selling bad debt and sits on it. And eventually starts thinking more carefully to whom lends money.
Most lenders already know how risky a particular loan is. They know the predicted default rate and price the credit accordingly, including the sell-on value. Reducing the sell-on value won't make them "more careful", it will just make them price the credit higher.
That may make the very, very bottom tier of borrowers unable to borrow--maybe--but it doesn't prevent the vast amount of borrowers from getting a loan. It just makes it more expensive.
Ad I said, I'm skeptical of the more expansive of such expectations. They might just sit on the debt, almost certainly if it's valued below a certain sum.
The chains of effect leading to a useful improvement in lending prudence... long. The opportunities to stray some other way, many. Graveyards are full of wonks that expect a minor policy tweak to fix a problem, rather than just move it around.
Most of these debts are unpaid bills, car payments, etc. Not businesses that specialise in debt. They outsource that part, and that part outsources too. "More prudent" means credit rating standards, or (usually) higher interest rate. That's not doing anything useful, IMO. You still get left with as much or more defaults, lawless collection, etc.
IMO, if when we want to actually deal with something, we drop the grand ideas and operate at the level of the issue we want to affect. Where there are multiple "orders," we want to tightly control the "chain."
Lawlessness in debt collection? Law enforcement. IP trolls abusing the legal system. Make it illegal.
Look... Google, FB and such had IP laws specially tailored to them. Timed and written to shield them from legitimate copyright infringement claims, taking into account their ability to "implement IP" without interfering with their business too much. Where is the law for the person in OP's shoes? It doesn't exist. He has to suffice with the print paradigm that existed before www.
Not-incidentally, the "print paradigm" was tailored for newspapers. That's what fair use is. It's not some abstract concept that happened to work for news. It was designed for them, probably by them. Copyright just isn't designed to work for ordinary people, so once you have incidents like this posts'... the realistic thing to do is avoid being a copyright user at all.
If you want a clever law expected to make debt valued <X% impossible to profitably collect, make it dumb. You probably need an institution of some sort to control that second order, or a willingness to make blanket laws that harm other participants that aren't your target. Consider the RL structure of consumer lending, not a chalkboard model.
Disney, Google, or the think tanks they fund to develop laws... they're certainly looking for a tightly controlled cause-effect chain with built in guarantees.
The daily mail et al will continue to pay them - £150 for the first photo £50 for each additional [1] of "celebrity walking into a party" or "royal shakes hand".
Are people with blogs really paying Getty Images £150-£450 to have one of their images on their blog post? I suspect nobody else was paying the photographers for the images before this and nobody will after, it changes nothing.
Royalties are typically calculated by quantity: you do N transactions, you pay N x Y to the rightsowner. For photos it could be the number of magazines you print, or a percentage of sale on each magazine, or the number of impressions on a website, etc.
"Royalty free licenses" are typically one-offs. You pay a fixed amount and then are free to reproduce the work as many times as you want. Some of these contracts might be limited, i.e. you can only do it in one magazine issue etc.
Yep - I could say "here, you can use my photo for your book cover, just give me a penny for each book made or sold".
But it's simpler accounting to go with "give me $1000 for use of my photo in one case" or even "everything" but then rarely my photo ends up on the cover of Harry Potter 12: Eclectic Boogaloo and I feel I missed out.
All humans are doing is ripping off other people's work to train themselves to produce art, or writing, or code, or whatever other endeavor that's not completely technical.
If you'd spend any time at all looking at midjourney creations, there's no way you can conclude that there's any significant amount of "ripping off" people's work. Certainly not in all or most cases.
With the right prompt you might be able to get something that looks eerily similar to an existing work, or artist style, but hardly anyone is interested in doing that, except for memes which are by definition modified and transformative. Nobody wants to AI-generate a mimic of a copyrighted work. If they wanted to do that, they'd just rip off the original work.
None of this is a new issue. The Warhol case even resolved one remaining facet. If you take an original work and apply photoshop filters to it, or do the equivalent manually or with AI, that doesn't alleviate the copyright compliance burden. The fuzzy area is how similar something has to be to fall under copyright; that'll remain subjective until the law or courts resolve it or copyright collapses entirely under its own weight, but the vast majority of AI generated content is nowhere close.
>If you'd spend any time at all looking at midjourney creations, there's no way you can conclude that there's any significant amount of "ripping off" people's work. Certainly not in all or most cases.
They were trained on work of people who didn't consent to it, the authors were not compensated, and currently are losing money (demand for their work) because of it. How is that not ripping off.
Please don't compare software to people. They're not similar legally, morally or in any other meaningful way.
Creators don't get compensated just because you wish them to be. Creators don't get compensated based on the fact that they put work into something. Creators can't demand money in license fees when something they produced is used by someone else, unless there's a contract saying so.
Copyright is not about consent to use. It's about consent to copy.
You're confusing copyright with licensing, where, for instance, I pay amazon to contractually license me an electronic copy of a book.
AI companies did not enter into and then violate contracts with anyone for the material they used to train. Some of them may have run afoul of ordinary copyright law to acquire the content in the first place.[1] Even supposing they did, that act is the violation; it wouldn't subsequently be an additional violation to train an AI using those works, instead of keeping the works around on a storage array, as long as it wasn't redistributed.
The alternative to AI models currently at issue—created by OpenAI Midjourney StabilityAI Meta Alphabet et al from a corpus of partly openly available content and partly content of dubious provenance—is not some license scheme where creators get compensated equitably. The real alternative is for companies like Disney and Adobe and book publishers and record labels to band together and have their own paywalled AI models and extract rent from that forever, which would still be sufficient to saturate the market for imagined content, and would still kill demand for everyone else's work.
[1] I'm skeptical, though open-minded, about this. I'm not aware of any successful lawsuits, or any lawsuits at all, targeting defendants who only downloaded copyrighted content from pirate sources, as long as they did not upload or re-upload at all. There might have been, and probably were sometimes, threatening letters sent to people's ISPs. Threatening letters don't mean anything at all.
If I compress a Getty images photo to .jpg and put it on my website I’m still breaching copyright even though it’s gone through lossy compression and isn’t exactly the same. That’s essentially all a AI model is doing.
And copyright applies to every copy, not just when you download something to train the model. It also applies every time you make a copy with said model.
Then make it closed source and sell usage tokens. It reminds me of kids on Scratch copying programs made by other kids then put "I MADE THIS!" in the description box.
A whole chapter could be written about turning (other peoples) images into executables and assert ownership with a new kind of DRM.
My wife received one of these threatening notices. In her case she had simply retweeted someone's tweet that contained the offending image. This enforcement activity is definitely the wrong side of abusive.
I wonder whether Twitter users are really legally liable for copyright violation in tweets they retweet, or whether the enforcers just believe they can get away with it.
I suppose it might differ from one jurisdiction to another. Are enforcers of this kind usually in the same jurisdiction as the supposed infringer?
This particular operation seemed to be in Germany - we're in another European country. She got two notices and ignored both. Nothing has come of them so far. Whatever about tweeting an infringing image, retweeting it seems like a bit of a reach.
I suspect a lot of images on Twitter are unintentionally infringing, and that Twitter users typically remain ignorant, because not many are targeted for enforcement. If copyright enforcement against tweeted images takes off, maybe that will change.
However, doesn't Twitter itself add images in some cases (especially where a user tweet a link, but probably also retweets of an image)? If Twitter still does that, does it suggest Twitter itself isn't being targeted for enforcement? If so, is that only because enforcers prefer smaller prey?
Can't websites that host user-generated content take steps (under the DMCA?) to ensure that users alone (and not the site) are liable for any copyright-infringing user-generated content?
If the users are sufficiently anonymised, or share accounts, prosecution might be difficult, but I'm not sure that makes them any less liable. I don't imagine that accounts themselves could be prosecuted, but I'm not a lawyer.
This is reminiscent of the youtube / twitch music copyright wars - 5 seconds of music gifts the revenue for an 8 hour stream to the copyright holder (or someone claiming to be the copyright holder).
Some observers saw opportunity in these; and there are now more than enough providers of Royalty / DMCA Free Music.
This was the problem I ran across in 2020, which I detailed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004892. Public domain hymns were being claimed, and they simply ignored my disputes so that they lapsed in my favour after 30 days, but next time we used the same hymn it still got automatically claimed and I had to dispute it again. They should have lost the ability to claim at least those hymns, and preferably just been booted from the platform for dishonesty (copy fraud).
If you are the target of automated copyright trolling, inspect your server logs whenever you get a notice. Some troll bots will (surprisingly) use an honest HTTP user agent so you can easily block it.
Of course, one can easily argue that knowingly blocking user agents that are entirely legal themselves, in order to prevent being caught violating copyright, is an entirely new crime.
(Remember that this site is considered a publishing business, they don't have the same luxuries when it comes to blocking visitors that individual have)
I'm assuming by honest they mean it explicitly states "Image Enforcement Bot" or similar - so it can be filtered out with very minimal risk to real users
The problem is that the infringement has already happened and that the fee that is being asked is for not bringing this to small claims court (which would be fee plus court fees).
From TFA: What he did is that he removed the ability for event organizers to provide images to him. The risks involved was simply too big, since many event organizers failed to clear permissions before submitting images to him.
I wonder if we'll see a startup selling an api for "finding the nearest open equivalent of a closed licensed photo" for these use cases. with 400$ per image liability, there seems to be some margin for indexing open collections and running search queries on top.
This is one space where I think generative AI would be helpful - generate pictures that look mostly right and fill a thumbnail or something on a webpage that doesn't necessarily provide indispensable information but nevertheless fills a void, and costs little. You could probably describe what was in the original photograph and/or draw a representation of it crappily in Paint and use generative AI to fill in the blanks, such that it wouldn't be considered a derivative work but rather just a representation of facts.
Currently most AI-generated images still have a "not quite right" look to them, that perhaps not everyone will notice, but those who do will be turned away by it, so I don't think that's a good idea.
I think the thing that makes AI images (from Midjourney especially) look a bit off is that they're too shiny and professional. All the people have suspiciously flawless skin, like they've been edited in Photoshop, there's no grain, and the colours are too vivid and dramatic. It looks great but it just doesn't seem real.
I gave it a try just then and the results tended towards cool-looking sunsets, reflective puddles, big dramatic stormy clouds and trees in bloom.
I think this is a result of selecting images for how aesthetic they are, and you could probably train a model on more average-looking pictures to get more realistic results.
I expect that will change over time. Until then, it would be nice to have some Fair Dealing exceptions for image copyright. Something like allowing non-profit use of a thumbnail to link to a licensed use of the corresponding image could help.
I feel like we’re in an ever escalating arms war here, with the result being an internet full of vacuous stuff posted just because that’s what everyone else does. Every blog post, tweet, and event listing must now have a bland stock image to go with it, even if that image has only a passing relationship with what’s being communicated.
Why does an event need an image in the first place? Just don’t bother with one if you care so little about what it looks like.
It is "trolling" in the sense of the original metaphor of troll fishing - make small demands from a huge number of small cases and get a decent total payment.
It may also be trolling in that it's not the photographer making the claim, but some company that buys rights specifically to do this kind of bulk demand.
Finally there is a sense that it is a very minor infringement - one where there would never have been a chance of a photographer making money off it in the first place. I don't think this is really a good justification, but might make the site a bit more miffed about the demands.
For the cases of copyright trolling and patent trolling, the metaphor comes from the “Three Billy Goats Gruff” story: a troll just sits there under “his” bridge until someone walks over the bridge, then he jumps out and threatens them. That’s more akin to what goes on with copyright trolling.
It’s trolling because the photos are easy to substitute or not use at all. No one is going to knowingly post a blog photo costing them 400 quid. It’s a gotcha.
I really object to using the term ‘trolls’. There are real people on the other end trying to earn an honest living from their chosen profession. Just because it’s ’only’ a blog, or my website is soo useful, doesn’t make it right to infringe on other people’s rights. It’s a good thing that techonology enables photographers to enforce their rights more efficiently.
A good side effects is that it is starting to sink in for website maintainers that, yeah, you cannot just pick the first photo that is convenient for you.
Yes, I used the term troll from my background many years ago writing about patent trolls, so maybe it irks people, but people who complain about one word in a much longer article are maybe... missing the point.
Anyway, as you will probably notice from the article, I am not "picking the first photos that is convenient", but being sent the banner images etc by event organisers to promote their events.
Yes, I can go back with a form for them to fill in and confirm they have copyright clearance etc., and doubtless they'll check, and confirm they have from photo agency X, and maybe I should also check that the photo agency has issued clearance, and that they themselves have validated that the photographer has verified they definetly took the photos... etc etc etc.
You can see that there has to be a point at which you accept that someone in the chain is being honest.
The issue isn't me nicking photos that are convenient, but accepting that a photo sent to me to use in an article/event listing has been cleared by the PR/marketing dept that is sending it to me.
The majority of problems come from small orgs who may seem to lack an awareness of copyright, so to protect myself, I am now taking the decision not to use their images unless I have built up trust in the sender.
However, even large orgs have been caught out - one example was the large theatre that paid for a license to use an image in a marketing poster, only for the stock agency to object to it being used on my website because the license (weirdly) only permitted use in their publications and no where else.
That's a large org trying to do the right thing, and I am trying to do the right thing, and still getting hammered by... well, yes, they're copyright trolls.
Surely you just have them sign a standard form that they have the correct license to allow you to use the image? Then, if you get targeted by a license holder the burden is passed to the people that told you they had the license. Regarding the larger org “trying to do the right thing”, they still failed to do their job properly. These license agreements are usually quite clear and specific in my experience. Their inability to understand it is the issue. They need to hire someone who can. I might not fully understand the tax system but I still have to follow it and “I tried my best” is not a valid excuse.
Charities, even small charities, have lots of money. They can handle small license fees. They want to comply with the law/regulations/licenses just like any other business.
I don’t think all orgs he’s dealing with are charities proper. AFAICT some of them are tiny volunteer-run groups. I think we safely can assume that not all of those groups have vast amounts of funding.
Fair enough. I still feel like you shouldn’t take stuff that’s not yours. The OP has made the right decision if they don’t want to deal with the overheads of ensuring the images are properly licensed, but denigrating people for catching you out on it isn’t a good look imo.
I guess the reason he wrote on his blog is to inform the users about the change. Why someone posted this to Hacker News though, I’m not sure… It doesn’t really invite to very interesting discussion, IMHO.
> hen, if you get targeted by a license holder the burden is passed to the people that told you they had the license.
Well, not really. The contract you propose will merely give this guy the right to sue his client. He'll still directly owe the moeny to the person making the copyright claim, because that's how liability works.
Right, it's a chain. The burden is still on the guy at the top and the shit rolls downhill.
What I want to know is -- what would stop a photographer anonymously uploading his entire portfolio to Wikimedia and then suing them for publishing all his images?
> because the license (weirdly) only permitted use in their publications and no where else
What is weird about that? You can buy the licence cheaply with restrictions and you can also pay much more for a less restricted version.
This makes perfect sense, if anyone who licences a picture could freely re-licence it to anyone then the original creator could only sell a licence once therefore they would have to ask much more for that licence to be able to make a living.
> people who complain about one word in a much longer article are maybe... missing the point
I don’t think so. The complaint goes to the hearth of the article. You cannot complain about people enforcing their copyright and at the same breath admit that they are right. If they are right then they are not copyright trolls.
Now if you would tell us a story where one of these people were trying to shake you down for an image you clearly and evidently had the copyright for that would be a different story. But your story as told undermines the phrase you are using, which is the core of the article.
As it reads you are chaffing that you have been ripping off people’s work (without intending to) and now they found an avenue to complain to you.
> I can go back with a form for them to fill in and confirm they have copyright clearance etc.
That is not what the form should say. What it should say is that they (named organisation if you trust them to be around, or named individual if you don’t trust the organisation) will pay any copyright fines you receive in relation to the images they gave you. This is a contract between you and them, so talk with a lawyer to make sure it can be enforced and has all the right elements.
I've helped one client who had been targeted by infringement notices for photos they own. In the process of helping them, I did some research into what's going on.
What happens is that Photographers supply their content library to a company that promises to defend their images against unauthorized distribution and collect appropriate licensing fees.
The problem is this:
1) these companies are very aggressive
2) they use some form of image matching search to detect image copies
3) the notices sent out are automated
4) the notices demand fees or legal action will be taken
5) there is no one to talk to or explain anything too
6) it's automated, abusive and often just plain inaccurate
This approach is very stressful for clients who haven't done anything wrong and dont understand what is happening. In some cases they have no control over an image that is published but attributed to them.
So yes, they are Trolls.
This isn't honest creatives defending their work.
In my clients case they had legitimately taken a very similar photo of a very popular public tourist attraction. Fortunately I was able to connect with the original photographer, and eventually, get them to call off their dogs.
There are real photographers enforcing their copyright, but there are also trolls. The trolls are pushing a few Fotos they made to Wikipedia and “free Foto”-sites with missing terms. Then they search for people who stole their images and extract money. Sure the people who used the images are in the wrong legally, but the trolls actually wanted their images to be stolen. Also, for the trolls, this is the only kind of revenue they get. Those images would never be legally bought or licensed anyway
> Then they search for people who stole their images and extract money.
I think part of this problem is that the assumed value of an image is practically 0. Conversely any YouTuber from some rural backwater will make sure there is no copyright music playing in the background of anything they intend to release because they know that it has non-0 value. The reason this changed is because people became more collectively aware of the consequences. The long term consequences are that people will ensure they have the appropriate permissions before using a photo. Even if this means paying a nearly negligible amount for access to collections of millions of photos like happens with music now.
Tfa suggested he was provided the images by a third party - how do I know the image I paid for on a stock image site is authentic and what’s to stop copywrite trolls from assuming it’s not?
Personally, I think image trolls (and most copywrite complaintants in general) can get fucked.
The article says these were images sent by the organisers.
So it's plausible that the organisers did get a license that allows this.
It's also plausible that they thought they were getting a license that allowed this.
Ultimately though, it seems the photographer had been paid at least once.
Further, in this case, it seems to me the onus should be on the organiser sending out the images intended to be used to promote the event, to make sure they have a license to do that, not on the individual websites. How are they supposed to confirm the copyright of an image, other than what they are told by the supplier of that image?
When the SFLC does GPL enforcement, their goal isn't to extract money from inevitable mistakes and oversights, but to bring the offender into compliance. Organizations who are trying to follow the rules and accidentally violate the letter of the law are given a chance to amend their practices; only when organizations intransigently resist following the rules are they targeted for lawsuits. This is enforcement: using the legal system to try to make the system work for everyone involved.
When Patrick McHardy [1] did "GPL enforcement", his goal wasn't to help bring people into enforcement, but to extract money from inevitable mistakes and oversights. Organizations trying to follow the spirit of the law but accidentally violating the letter of the law were lured into restrictive contracts and then punished for minor infractions. This is trolling: using the legal system to intimidate and extract money for minor infractions.
A proper "enforcement" interaction in this case, which was actually trying to make the system work well for everyone involved, would look like this:
Enforcer to website: "You seem to have image X; do you have a license?"
Website: "I got the image from the marketing department of Y; they said their license covered it."
Enforcer to Y: "It seems you gave image X to organization Z for their website; but your license only covers you to use the image on posters. If you want to use the image for partner websites, please upgrade to the version of the license which allows this, or pay this one-off license fee."
Y: "Oh yes, sorry about that; here you go."
Photographer is paid for their image, innocent people don't end up paying fines for simple mistakes; the system works for everyone involved.
> A good side effects is that it is starting to sink in for website maintainers that, yeah, you cannot just pick the first photo that is convenient for you.
But that's not what he did. He used the artwork his client supplied.
It’s wild to me that these photo copyright trolls are apparently able to make money off the often zero-dollar-value earned from the use of copyrighted photos but nobody can get money out of the thousand t-shirt & merch printing companies claiming the DCMA protects them when actually selling, manufacturing & delivering bootleg products.
Does anyone have an example of a copyright troll like this? I.e. a company that offers this kind of copyright enforcement services?
I'm trying to understand how this works. E.g. what is their business model, is this something that would be used by individual photographers, by agencies or by corporations, etc
This practice has brought me a lot of joy over the years. My photos have appeared on Wikipedia, in concert promotions, and even in a special Ibiza edition of Monopoly. The Monopoly team didn't have to, but they sent me two copies of the game as a thank-you, which was a lovely touch.
For those of you who are like-minded and have photos that could be of public interest, consider setting a Creative Commons license on platforms like Flickr. Doing so could ease the burden for small publishers like ianVisits, allowing them to use high-quality images without worrying about legal repercussions.