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.
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.
Like the "media company" said, I think you should make a claim against the site you linked to. Their redistribution of the image through a protocol meant to show up embedded on other people's sites is an implicit claim that they have the right to sublicense the image.
edit: the claim would be a favor. Just ask them for what you paid, and charge them for your time. They'll pay you with petty cash and get their lawyer to come up with an image policy to avoid difficulties in future.
Anyway, websites don't like hearing that people can get sued for linking to them.
basically they're not going to get anything from Twitter with their army of lawyers but once you hosted it on your own website you became personally liable to hold a license for any images your site displayed.
Fair Use - Internet Publication - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Internet_publication
> "... the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ... found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative"
It kind of irritated me that he immediately capitulated in a case that was obviously frivolous. Then posted it; has he no shame?
One of the good things (maybe) about AI-generated images, is that you could generate an image that only exists for your article. The rub is that the generator may be giving you an image that is close enough to a copyrighted one, that you could still be sued.
I think that fonts could have the same problem.
Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
However, republishing that preview elsewhere is still publishing and the author of the post seems to have missed that. Instead he should just publish the link to the media site and let the client that browse his archive access (download) the OpenGraph preview by itself.
Twitter/X does that republishing, but having the license for that republishing is their problem.
I'm curious to know if that preview was part of the Twitter archive. Because it doesn't qualify as "your" content.
I dealt with them before. Just ignore them and stop opening email. They asked 800 euro for 2 small images. Since a OP is in UK the tought they can do triple price.
In the US usage like this may be considered "Fair Use", however UK copyright law is less generous in its "Fair Dealing" and associated exceptions to copyright[1].
This is a problem when standards are pushed by US tech companies but don't consider the rest of the world.
What would have changed? This isn’t a problem that can be solved in a protocol. Even if a field was added for license information, it wouldn’t actually constitute a license if someone put the wrong info into the field (claiming to license content they didn’t own). It also wouldn’t have solved anything if there was an implied license for use on, e.g., social media sites as the author re-hosted it on their own domain.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame the tech companies for making a protocol. It’s up to the users to confirm their country allows the usage.
> In the US usage like this may be considered "Fair Use", however UK copyright law is less generous in its "Fair Dealing" and associated exceptions to copyright[1].
> This is a problem when standards are pushed by US tech companies but don't consider the rest of the world.
Similarly, the German analogue to the US-American copyright laws (Urheberrecht) has no concept of fair use (meaning that a lot of memes that are based copyrighted material are actually illegal under German law), but on the other hand, as far as I am aware (IANAL), there is more explicit permissions for citations (Zitierrecht) in Germany (instead of relying on "vague" concepts such as fair use), meaning that I conceive at least fictional situations (but IANAL) where it might happen that quotations of copyrighted material are legal under German law, but not considered to be "fair use" under US copyright.
"Soy faced techblogger with no spine funds copyright troll and/or scammer"