CC-BY Trolls

A pre­sen­ta­tion with­out images sucks. There­fore, we are some­times tempt­ed to take some from the Inter­net for beau­ti­fy­ing our work. There are so many excel­lent pic­tures on the World Wide Web. But to legal­ly insert­ing a for­eign pic­ture in one’s own pre­sen­ta­tion is not that easy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a new type of troll has emerged recent­ly, the image trolls.

If we reuse pic­tures from the Inter­net, we have to respect the copy­rights of the painters or pho­tog­ra­phers, just as we have to pay license fees to the patent own­ers, if we use their tech­niques, or as we have to ful­fill the license require­ments if we reuse open-source soft­ware. Recent­ly, a new type of troll has emerged, the ‘image troll’.[1] It is good to know how they work and how we can pro­tect our­selves from falling vic­tim to them:

Often, free pic­tures are released under one of the Cre­ative-Com­mons Licens­es. They are sim­i­lar to Open-Source Licens­es: both fol­low the prin­ci­ple ‘Pay­ing by Doing’. Instead of pay­ing for get­ting the right to use licensed objects, you have to do some­thing. Which rights you get and what you have to do depends on the license. There exists a com­plex sys­tem of cre­ative com­mons licens­es[2], but near­ly all of them have a ‘BY’ clause indi­cat­ing, that you must give the pho­tog­ra­pher’s name, state the license ver­sion, and include a link to down­load the image and a link to down­load the license text.[3]

These BY-con­di­tions are — as the dis­cov­er­er of the image trolls said — “[…] easy to get wrong”.[4] That’s the one ingre­di­ent an image troll needs: the eas­i­er it is to miss the con­di­tions, the more poten­tial vic­tims he has.

The sec­ond ingre­di­ent is, that ear­li­er ver­sions of the CC-licens­es — like the license CC-BY 2.0 or the license CC-BY 3.0 — con­tain a “Ter­mi­na­tion” clause: “This License and the rights grant­ed here­un­der will ter­mi­nate auto­mat­i­cal­ly upon any breach by You of the terms of this License.”[5] The mean­ing of this clause is, that you ‘lose’ the rights of use the moment you fail to ful­fill a con­di­tion.

One can rec­og­nize the explo­sive­ness of such a clause from the fact that the license CC-BY 4.0 also con­tains a ter­mi­na­tion clause, but addi­tion­al­ly pro­vides the pos­si­bil­i­ty to heal a vio­la­tion: It says that the ter­mi­nat­ed rights “[…] rein­states auto­mat­i­cal­ly as of the date the vio­la­tion is cured, pro­vid­ed it is cured with­in 30 days of Your dis­cov­ery of the vio­la­tion […]”.[6]

As a third ingre­di­ent an ‘image troll’ needs a method to auto­mat­i­cal­ly find the users of his pic­tures and to ana­lyze whether he failed to ful­fill the require­ments. The auto­mat­ed search for sim­i­lar images on the Inter­net is now a very well-estab­lished tech­nique

The fourth ingre­di­ent an ‘image troll’ needs is a legal sys­tem grant­i­ng him large com­pen­sa­tion pay­ments for rights vio­la­tions — just as it is done in the USA.

So, how does an image troll work? He only must cre­ate nice pic­tures and pub­lish them in a well-used image data­base under any CC license with a ter­mi­na­tion clause — and the “hon­ey­pot” is set up. After that, he must auto­mat­i­cal­ly crawl the inter­net for his pic­tures and ana­lyze whether his con­di­tions have been ful­filled. If not, he can file a law­suit against the respec­tive user — his next vic­tim. And at least in the USA, we talk about “statu­to­ry dam­ages” up to $150.000.[7]

What can we do to pro­tect our­selves from such attacks, which are legal but at the very least go against the spir­it of free soft­ware and doc­u­ments?

• The best method to pro­tect your self is a) to per­fect­ly know under which terms the pic­tures you are going to reuse are licensed, and b) to thor­ough­ly ful­fill all license require­ments.
• A good method is to focus on CC0 licensed pic­tures[8] as — for exam­ple — offered by pxhere.com[9]: a license, which does not require any­thing, can­not be mis­used to file a law­suit against you.
• Anoth­er good method is to focus on CC-BY-xyz 4.0 licensed pic­tures.[A] While you must also thor­ough­ly com­ply with all licens­ing require­ments, at least you have a chance to iron out your mis­takes.
• If you want to use CC-BY-xyz 3.0 or ear­li­er licensed pic­tures, you should read and apply the license text, not only the sum­maries, offered by cre­ative com­mons.

But ignor­ing image copy­rights alto­geth­er and just grab­bing off the inter­net what you think you need is the most cer­tain way to get caught up in a law­suit — just as using Open Source Soft­ware with­out ful­fill­ing the license require­ments or using patent­ed tech­niques with­out pay­ing the license fees.

Footnotes:

• [1], [4], [7]: cf. https://doctorow.medium.com/a‑bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299. This arti­cle reports on aspects that Cory Doc­torow has out­lined first. He talks about ‘copy­left trolls’ prob­a­bly for indi­cat­ing, that oth­er than pic­tures can be used to estab­lish such an attack. But I think that using pic­tures inad­e­quate­ly is the most dan­ger.
• [2]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
• [3]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode, Sec­tion 3 Attri­bu­tion. It is worth to know the CC orga­ni­za­tion pro­vide sum­maries that con­dense these con­di­tions to the one sen­tence ‘Cred­it must be giv­en to the cre­ator’ (cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Hence, you are not free to acknowl­edge the author just as you want.
• [5]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode or https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
• [6]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
• [8]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• [9]: cf. https://pxhere.com/en/license
• [A]: cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0