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A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator

Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.

Medium

Well

This ain’t good

But if you hire mercenaries to hunt down copyright infringers, you share the blame when they go after innocents. You set that landmine, so you have some responsibility for the legs it blows off.

The reality is that the automated enforcement tools that Pixsy uses will always generate false positives, and the people who operate those tools have no incentive to look too closely at the accusations they generate. False accusations merely terrorize random strangers, who can’t punish you in any way, except, perhaps, by embarrassing you.

Stojkovic is an individual photographer in Serbia. It’s possibly he just hasn’t been around this kind of operation enough to anticipate this outcome. But there are plenty of others who should absolutely know better, who keep hiring fishermen to hang out their tuna-nets without regard to the dolphins they know they’ll catch.

Take HarperCollins (one of the four largest publishers in the world) and Penguin Random House (the largest publisher in the world, in the process of acquiring Simon & Schuster). They definitely should know better.

And yet: HarperCollins and PRH hired Link-Busters, an “anti-piracy” company, to send legal notices to Google in order to flense the internet of pirate editions of their books (disclosure, I have books in print from both publishers).

You can probably guess what happened next. Link-Busters’ automated process misidentified the book reviews at Fantasy Book Critic, a noncommercial site whose volunteers have reviewed over 1,000 books in its 15 year history. Link-Busters, acting on behalf of HarperCollins and PRH, lied to Google and claimed Fantasy Book Critic was full of infringing material, and Google deleted the site, which was hosted on its Blogger platform.

Link-Busters is culpable here, obviously, but HarperCollins and PRH must shoulder part of the blame. Fantasy Book Critic embodies millions of hours of volunteer labor from their own best customers, all in service promoting their books. HarperCollins and PRH knowingly put those volunteers — and every other online book-lover — in harm’s way.

Ironically, the one place where reviewers can be certain they won’t face capricious removal thanks to off-the-leash mercenaries employed by giant publishers is Goodreads, the monopoly review platform owned and operated by Amazon, which serves as a powerful funnel that drives dedicated readers to Amazon, strengthening its commercial control over HarperCollins and PRH.

The good news is that Fantasy Book Critic is now back online, because authors and readers flooded Google with complaints and pleas (this is generally the only way to get Google to address its own mistakes, and obviously it doesn’t scale).

It could get much, much worse. Rightsholder groups are backing a Copyright Office plan to make this kind of robosigning into law, forcing all online platforms to institute filters that automatically remove materials that an algorithm finds to be infringing, without human oversight or judgement.

It’s a recipe for a world where the mercenaries are robotic, remorseless, and act with utter impunity. When a first-name-only Pixsy rep calls you Colin and threatens to sue you for $150,000, at least you can call them out publicly. But when the robosigners are baked into every public forum, even that small measure of accountability is denied to you.

This is not a fucking bug in Creative Commons licenses.

This is companies using copyright law as a censorship tool because the courts refuse to enforce the parts of the law that make it illegal to make false copyright claims.

The fact that copyright trolls are able to do this at all instead of having that ability cut off means that it absolutely is a bug in early CC licenses. Doctorow goes into detail in the article.