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Podcasting about the copyleft trolls who tried to shake me down
Pixsy and the depravity of speculative invoicing.
This week on my podcast, I read my Medium column “A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator,” describing my bizarre run-in with a group of copyleft trolls who tried to shake me down for $600.
What’s a copyleft troll, you ask? Well, in many ways, they’re like copyright trolls: sleazy operators who hunt for trivial but infringing uses of their clients’ copyrighted works and threaten to sue for statutory damages of $150,000 unless their victims pay for a “license” costing anywhere from $250 to $10,000.
But copyleft trolls are, if anything, even sleazier, because they target non-infringing uses of copyrighted works that have been released under early versions of Creative Commons licenses. These early licenses all shared a minor oversight: they “terminat[ed] automatically upon any breach.”
That meant that if you violated the license terms in any way, you were no longer allowed to post or use the work. That may sound reasonable, but in the hands of copyleft trolls, it’s anything but. They seek out…
