In U.S. courts, a phenomenon of copyleft trolls is emerging, who employ aggressive schemes to instigate mass lawsuits, taking advantage of users' carelessness when utilizing content distributed under various open licenses. The term "copyleft troll," proposed by Professor Daxton R. Stewart, is viewed as an evolution of "copyright trolls" and is not directly related to the concept of "copyleft."
In particular, copyleft trolls can launch attacks both when distributing content under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY) license and under the copyleft Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) license. Profit-driven photographers and artists post their work on Flickr or Wikipedia under CC-BY licenses, then actively identify users violating the license terms and demand royalty payments ranging from $750 to $3,500 for each violation. Should payment be refused, a copyright infringement lawsuit is filed in court.
CC-BY licenses require proper attribution and citation of the license when copying and distributing material. If these conditions are not met while using Creative Commons licenses up to version 3.0 inclusive, the license may be immediately revoked, terminating all rights granted to the licensee, after which the rights holder can seek financial penalties for copyright infringement through the courts. In Creative Commons 4.0 licenses, to prevent abuse of the revocation of licenses, a mechanism was added that provides 30 days to remedy violations and allows for the automatic restoration of revoked rights.
Many users have a false impression that if a photograph is posted on Wikipedia and is distributed under a CC-BY license, it is freely available and can be used in their materials without any formalities. As a result, many people copying photos from collections of free materials do not bother to mention the author, and if they do credit the author, they often forget to provide a complete link to the original or to the CC-BY license text. Using content under older versions of Creative Commons licenses can lead to enough violations to revoke the license and file a lawsuit, which is exploited by copyleft trolls.
Among recent incidents is the case of the suspension of the Twitter account @Foone, dedicated to vintage hardware. The channel's host posted a photograph of the SONY MAVICA CD200 camera taken from Wikipedia, distributed under CC-BY terms, but did not mention the author. This led the rights holder of the photo to send a DMCA takedown request to Twitter for copyright infringement, resulting in the suspension of the account.
Source: opennet.ru
