My initial reaction to this is that the licensor is a scammer and the author just got fleeced. I don’t know much about the law in the UK, but this tactic is almost identical to the one media licensing companies in the US used to go after old ladies whose grandkids had torrented movies on their internet connections. At least in the US there are many jurisdictions now where those types of cases are just immediately thrown out.
The main difference I see here is the author got bit by an automated tool. It really should be more or less considered a clerical error. I don’t see how paying $1000 is easier or cheaper than just showing up to court if asked and arguing your use was both easy to occur by mistake and didn’t represent anywhere near that value. This strategy has several advantages, among them being not having to pay until the court has ruled, which is a huge deterrent to shops like this. Just being willing to go to court automatically lowers the price you’ll end up paying. But if you don’t show that willingness you’re paying full price, even with the fakery about the 10% discount.
This is the new source of income and a lot of media orgs are getting paid - take ANI in India.
Theyve been hitting YouTubers like Mohak Mangal, Nitish Rajput, Dhruv Rathee with copyright strikes for using just a few seconds of news clips which you would think is fair use.
Then they privately message creators demanding $60000 to remove the strikes or else the channel gets deleted after the third strike.
It s not about protecting content anymore it's copyright extortion. Fair use doesn't matter. System like Youtube makes it easy to abuse and nearly impossible to fight.
It s turning into a business model: pay otherwise your channels with millions of subs get deleted
'Which you would think is fair use' - I must admit I wouldn't think that. When I consider Indian content creators making use of clips from Indian media organisations I can't really imagine why Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions, wouldn't apply. Sure, you get to argue the strike on Youtube using their DMCA based system, but that has no legal bearing on your liability under Indian law.
I really like this aspect of US copyright law. I think the recent Anthropic judgement is a great example of how flexible US law is. I wish more jurisdictions would adopt it.
“This undermines the entire point of the open graph protocol (at least for images). If you have to manually review every image that you include then what's the point in it being a machine protocol?”
Bingo.
Ianal but it feels like if you provide an image via an open graph link, you’re implicitly licensing that image to consumers of the Open Graph protocol to be displayed alongside a link/link metadata.
If the media company didn’t have the rights to relicense that image for consumption via Open Graph and/or the original licensor didn’t want their images appearing via Open Graph, that media company shouldn’t be using Open Graph.
That is such a frustrating situation. I hope the courts would have ruled in your favor but I understand why you chose not to test it.
Prenda Law. They ended up disbarred and in jail eventually. But it took a Federal Judge calling bullshit in open court and making personal referrals to the IRS, the DOJ, and the various State Bar Associations.
The problem with paying ransoms is that even if it actually is the most cost effective solution in any one case, it just creates the incentive for more rapacious behavior.
I think I'd be willing to pay $800 of my time to disincentivize that behavior.
It’s a shakedown scam. IANAL and all that. Gaming it tells me it’s easier to remove the offending focus and ignore them until they send another nastygram. Never directly reply. Dave’s not here, man. Anybody doing this bullshit over an open graph image is looking for a mark. Generally, that’s why there are three strikes policies, etc. Why engage until they initiate? You speak through lawyers and they really have to have a real case or they’re wasting money because this is purely not malicious or profit seeking.
> But ultimately, the easiest and cheapest option for me was still to pay. The chance that it was taken further and the potential cost in terms of money, time, energy from me was too high, higher than the license fee — even if I didn't feel it was justified. So I paid the fee and moved on.
Although it's an interesting and relevant writeup/intellectual property conundrum, I'd feel like the move would have at most been to pull the archive offline and delete or mark the email as spam, assuming the unlikely case that it's not actually automated extortion. There's a few likely angles I thought about hypothetically having taken, but ultimately I firmly don't believe my lack of having read an email or my actual mail constitutes having taken any action at all. If I was interested enough in the problem, I'd just let them decide to track me down some other way afterward. Things are only as enforceable as they are.
That said, I've had collections calls ending up in my voicemail for years, and they are sure as hell not getting paid and haven't tried to take me to court afaik.
Edit: Incidentally, I quite like the dynamic background graphic. A neat art style and reminds me of recent macos backgrounds.
I am still not clear on what Open Graph is or how the image was used here. Some visual aids would have helped tremendously. I assume it is how a specific thumbnail is included alongside an embedded tweet or article snippet?
From what I can gather, it sounds like his copyright exposure came up when he exported his Twitter archive, including the image in question, and hosted (and, crucially, published) it on his own server. Am I thinking about this the right way?
Open graph essentially provides thumbnails and title data for a news article or publication as links, so the news article returned a header image that displays in the tweet "preview"
In this case the Tweet would have been
> TWEET
> linked article with open graph image
When exported the author then returned that same open graph info on their personal site, thus rendering a copyrighted image without a license.
Notably, Twitter also re-hosts opengraph thumbnail images via their image CDN (as would just about any other site or app that processes opengraph embeds)
The newspaper distributed the image. They said, "Here, use this image on the link to our story". They effectively sub-licensed it. If the 'owner' had a problem with that, they needed to take it up with the newspaper.
As such, the OP was under the impression the image was free to use in that context. Only once they were informed that was not the case did they become libel. They could have then licensed the photo for the 20 pounds and been done with it. Or just deleted the link off of their website (and also been done with it.)
Even in English law there's 'intent'. The OP had no intent to offend and shouldn't have paid; by feeding the troll they've unfortunately done the world a disservice, although I do empathize with their decision-making.
I don't think the troll would have gone to court, a negative precedent would have been bad for their 'business'.
> The OP had no intent to offend and shouldn't have paid
That can't be how it works. The OP had a responsibility to check the that images that the OP published were adequately licensed. The rights holder makes a claim against the publisher (the OP), and the publisher can make a claim against their supplier (the newspaper.) The judge would then divide the amount of responsibility between the two in some proportion.
Only within reason. The archive was published in bulk. I don't think there's any expectation every single post in an archive is checked prior to publication.
But more than that, even had the author explicitly checked the thumbnail had been provided by the original publisher via Open Graph. Effectively the original publisher publicly provided this image and suggested that people use it in this manner. There was no realistic way for the author to become aware that the copyright owner did not consent to this use until receiving the notice.
Readit News
The main difference I see here is the author got bit by an automated tool. It really should be more or less considered a clerical error. I don’t see how paying $1000 is easier or cheaper than just showing up to court if asked and arguing your use was both easy to occur by mistake and didn’t represent anywhere near that value. This strategy has several advantages, among them being not having to pay until the court has ruled, which is a huge deterrent to shops like this. Just being willing to go to court automatically lowers the price you’ll end up paying. But if you don’t show that willingness you’re paying full price, even with the fakery about the 10% discount.
I also thought that maybe the person was the scammer, setting up a website where they could post what someone else did in their situation.
Theyve been hitting YouTubers like Mohak Mangal, Nitish Rajput, Dhruv Rathee with copyright strikes for using just a few seconds of news clips which you would think is fair use.
Then they privately message creators demanding $60000 to remove the strikes or else the channel gets deleted after the third strike.
It s not about protecting content anymore it's copyright extortion. Fair use doesn't matter. System like Youtube makes it easy to abuse and nearly impossible to fight.
It s turning into a business model: pay otherwise your channels with millions of subs get deleted
[1] https://the420.in/dhruv-rathee-mohak-mangal-nitish-rajput-an...
I really like this aspect of US copyright law. I think the recent Anthropic judgement is a great example of how flexible US law is. I wish more jurisdictions would adopt it.
Are they really? I've been believing the opposite. What fair use does US allow that India doesn't?
It's always been about copyright extortion.
Bingo.
Ianal but it feels like if you provide an image via an open graph link, you’re implicitly licensing that image to consumers of the Open Graph protocol to be displayed alongside a link/link metadata.
If the media company didn’t have the rights to relicense that image for consumption via Open Graph and/or the original licensor didn’t want their images appearing via Open Graph, that media company shouldn’t be using Open Graph.
That is such a frustrating situation. I hope the courts would have ruled in your favor but I understand why you chose not to test it.
Things did not end well, for that lot.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/
I think I'd be willing to pay $800 of my time to disincentivize that behavior.
Although it's an interesting and relevant writeup/intellectual property conundrum, I'd feel like the move would have at most been to pull the archive offline and delete or mark the email as spam, assuming the unlikely case that it's not actually automated extortion. There's a few likely angles I thought about hypothetically having taken, but ultimately I firmly don't believe my lack of having read an email or my actual mail constitutes having taken any action at all. If I was interested enough in the problem, I'd just let them decide to track me down some other way afterward. Things are only as enforceable as they are.
That said, I've had collections calls ending up in my voicemail for years, and they are sure as hell not getting paid and haven't tried to take me to court afaik.
Edit: Incidentally, I quite like the dynamic background graphic. A neat art style and reminds me of recent macos backgrounds.
From what I can gather, it sounds like his copyright exposure came up when he exported his Twitter archive, including the image in question, and hosted (and, crucially, published) it on his own server. Am I thinking about this the right way?
In this case the Tweet would have been
> TWEET > linked article with open graph image
When exported the author then returned that same open graph info on their personal site, thus rendering a copyrighted image without a license.
As such, the OP was under the impression the image was free to use in that context. Only once they were informed that was not the case did they become libel. They could have then licensed the photo for the 20 pounds and been done with it. Or just deleted the link off of their website (and also been done with it.)
Even in English law there's 'intent'. The OP had no intent to offend and shouldn't have paid; by feeding the troll they've unfortunately done the world a disservice, although I do empathize with their decision-making.
I don't think the troll would have gone to court, a negative precedent would have been bad for their 'business'.
That can't be how it works. The OP had a responsibility to check the that images that the OP published were adequately licensed. The rights holder makes a claim against the publisher (the OP), and the publisher can make a claim against their supplier (the newspaper.) The judge would then divide the amount of responsibility between the two in some proportion.
Only within reason. The archive was published in bulk. I don't think there's any expectation every single post in an archive is checked prior to publication.
But more than that, even had the author explicitly checked the thumbnail had been provided by the original publisher via Open Graph. Effectively the original publisher publicly provided this image and suggested that people use it in this manner. There was no realistic way for the author to become aware that the copyright owner did not consent to this use until receiving the notice.