Beware the copyleft trolls

From the article:

The scam works a little like this:

A photographer posts their work online under an outdated Creative Commons license, such as version 2.0, that does not give licensees the right to fix license problems within 30 days of notice, as do the current CC 4.0 licenses.

The photographers lurk until someone unwittingly posts the photograph online without proper attribution.

Then, they sue. And they sue. And they sue.

[...]

Verch’s scam is a profitable one. He posts stock photography he savvily generates to meet market demand, such as images of “face coverings, test tubes and people wearing masks” that he put on his website at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Then, he waits for someone to slip up on the CC-BY-2.0 attribution. And he pounces.

This is, of course, perfectly legal under modern U.S. copyright law. He’s won thousands of dollars in default judgments against companies using his photos, including $6,500 damages with $2,975 in attorney fees in one lawsuit in 2020 in the Northern District of Texas (Verch v. White Rock Security Group). And Verch is an amateur compared to Larry Philpot, a country music photographer who has filed more than 150 copyright infringement lawsuits across the country over the past decade for his CC-licensed works, extracting thousands of dollars of settlements and damage awards and getting him called a “copyright troll” more than once by federal judges.

And here is a longer article about it from Cory Doctorow.