My initial reaction to this is that the licensor is a scammer and the author just got fleeced. I don’t know much about the law in the UK, but this tactic is almost identical to the one media licensing companies in the US used to go after old ladies whose grandkids had torrented movies on their internet connections. At least in the US there are many jurisdictions now where those types of cases are just immediately thrown out.
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.
superasn · 6h ago
This is the new source of income and a lot of media orgs are getting paid - take ANI in India.
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
'Which you would think is fair use' - I must admit I wouldn't think that. When I consider Indian content creators making use of clips from Indian media organisations I can't really imagine why Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions, wouldn't apply. Sure, you get to argue the strike on Youtube using their DMCA based system, but that has no legal bearing on your liability under Indian law.
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.
dartharva · 4h ago
> Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions
Are they really? I've been believing the opposite. What fair use does US allow that India doesn't?
kirrent · 3h ago
Very different in character. The US fair use four factor test (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/) is really flexible. You don't need to fall into an enumerated exception to infringement to argue that your use is transformative, won't substitute in the marketplace, etc.
Look at the famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case. Google scanned every work they could put their hands on and showed excerpts to searching users. Copying and distribution on an incredible scale! Yet, they get to argue that it won't substitute in the marketplace (the snippets are too small to prevent people buying a book), it's a transformative use (this is about searching books not reading books), and the actual disclosed text is small (even if the copying in the backend is large scale).
On the other hand, fair dealing is purpose specific. Those enumerated purposes vary across jurisdictions and India's seems broadish (I live in a different fair dealing jurisdiction). Reading s52 your purposes are:
- private or personal use, including research
- criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work
- reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public.
Within those confines, you then get to argue purpose (e.g. how transformative), amount used, market effect, nature of the copyrighted work, etc. But if your use doesn't fall into the allowed purposes, you're out of luck to begin with.
I'm not familiar enough with Indian common law to know if the media clips those youtubers you mentioned should fall within the reporting purpose. I'm sure the answer would be complex. But all of this is to say, we often treat the world like it has one copyright law (one of the better ones) when that's not the case! Something appreciated by TFA.
The big one being transformative use is fair-use in the US but not India.
giantrobot · 5h ago
> It s not about protecting content anymore it's copyright extortion.
It's always been about copyright extortion.
jim201 · 6h ago
“This undermines the entire point of the open graph protocol (at least for images). If you have to manually review every image that you include then what's the point in it being a machine protocol?”
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.
ChrisMarshallNY · 5h ago
Wonder if it was like that law firm that Ars Technica wrote about[0], that seeded porn videos, then went after people who downloaded them.
Prenda Law. They ended up disbarred and in jail eventually. But it took a Federal Judge calling bullshit in open court and making personal referrals to the IRS, the DOJ, and the various State Bar Associations.
n8cpdx · 6h ago
The problem with paying ransoms is that even if it actually is the most cost effective solution in any one case, it just creates the incentive for more rapacious behavior.
I think I'd be willing to pay $800 of my time to disincentivize that behavior.
adfm · 5h ago
It’s a shakedown scam. IANAL and all that. Gaming it tells me it’s easier to remove the offending focus and ignore them until they send another nastygram. Never directly reply. Dave’s not here, man. Anybody doing this bullshit over an open graph image is looking for a mark. Generally, that’s why there are three strikes policies, etc. Why engage until they initiate? You speak through lawyers and they really have to have a real case or they’re wasting money because this is purely not malicious or profit seeking.
brailsafe · 4h ago
> But ultimately, the easiest and cheapest option for me was still to pay. The chance that it was taken further and the potential cost in terms of money, time, energy from me was too high, higher than the license fee — even if I didn't feel it was justified. So I paid the fee and moved on.
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.
nocoiner · 6h ago
I am still not clear on what Open Graph is or how the image was used here. Some visual aids would have helped tremendously. I assume it is how a specific thumbnail is included alongside an embedded tweet or article snippet?
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?
dbetteridge · 6h ago
Open graph essentially provides thumbnails and title data for a news article or publication as links, so the news article returned a header image that displays in the tweet "preview"
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.
Retr0id · 6h ago
Notably, Twitter also re-hosts opengraph thumbnail images via their image CDN (as would just about any other site or app that processes opengraph embeds)
Kilenaitor · 5h ago
To elaborate with some context: large sites do this to avoid hammering a small site if posts containing the link go viral.
Like imagine the thumbnail were fetched every time a link appeared in someone's Facebook/Twitter feed. That could be tens of millions of hits easy.
Retr0id · 5h ago
It's also a privacy leak - the target page would get to know about every thumbnail view (a la tracking pixel). Although it's likely they only care about keeping that data so they can sell it for themselves, rather than actual privacy.
protocolture · 6h ago
This feels a lot like reading a technical description of someone choosing to pay an african prince. This is just extortion.
scosman · 6h ago
Title is a bit misleading. They did use the image on twitter, but the company asked for a license fee for re-publishing it on their personal website in the form of a twitter archive.
slimebot80 · 6h ago
True. Open graph images imply the expectation of it being used by third parties, and as others have said - they chose a little guy to bully but would never do this to X.
Thorrez · 1h ago
Was the image hotlinked? Or was it copied and rehosted instead? I think that's an important consideration in image copyright cases like this.
Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
ChrisMarshallNY · 6h ago
Just a caution: Many "Free" images are likely actually scraped. I've learned to be careful. I usually use images from only a couple of places (including paid sources), because I really don't trust many "royalty-free" image sources. I have also taken to providing source links in the image captions.
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.
blindriver · 6h ago
Displaying a thumbnail is considered fair use. You got fleeced.
Is it actually? There is no explicit carve-outs in fair use laws for the use-case of thunbnails that I'm aware of, so where is the case law on this?
kbelder · 5h ago
Any number of large companies are doing it without being sued, with no better justification. They company is just scammy and going after people too small and scared to resist.
It kind of irritated me that he immediately capitulated in a case that was obviously frivolous. Then posted it; has he no shame?
dbetteridge · 6h ago
Sucks that companies do this but seems like it's inline with the law
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.
No comments yet
sumanthvepa · 6h ago
I create most of my OpenGraph images using AI. As far as I can tell, there is no copyright on those images. They are in the public domain (I think?)
robertlutece · 1m ago
I may be wrong, but I believe the distinction is between if I were to link to your post with one of your generated images which would get served as og:image and if I were to re-host your image to have it stand in as an "open-graph image" on my site linking to your post then what are the repercussions for me.
hofo · 3h ago
I thought the “open” part was that anyone could use the “protocol”, not that it had any usage context for the content in the tags.
userbinator · 5h ago
This is incidentally also why anonymity is a good thing, but unfortunately you're too late to take advantage of that.
empressplay · 6h ago
The newspaper distributed the image. They said, "Here, use this image on the link to our story". They effectively sub-licensed it. If the 'owner' had a problem with that, they needed to take it up with the newspaper.
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'.
pessimizer · 5h ago
> The OP had no intent to offend and shouldn't have paid
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.
fc417fc802 · 2h ago
> The OP had a responsibility to check
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.
dontdoxxme · 6h ago
#include <Usual IANAL comment>
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.
> 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.
aleph_minus_one · 6h ago
#include <Usual IANAL comment>
> 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.
mig39 · 5h ago
Yeah, one of the tests for "Fair Dealing" exceptions to copyright in Canada is ... could you have produced you work without infringing copyright. If so, then it's not Fair Dealing.
mister_mort · 6h ago
I guess the big question for me here is - what is the state of stuff like "implied licenses" in Britain?
GrantMoyer · 2h ago
There's no implied license because the news site that told them to use the image — through the OpenGraph protocol — is (supposedly) not the rights holder.
aedis · 4h ago
This is probably CopyTrack. They have hidden 1px tracker jnside email. These are extortion tactics.
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.
bmacho · 2h ago
They don't see if you open your email or even if you download and open the attachments, at least in any sane email client. If your email client sends reading information back then you should replace it instead of not clicking on emails.
chemmail · 3h ago
Why not just remove that one link/image?
pessimizer · 6h ago
Wouldn't the problem lie entirely within some publication serving an image that they didn't have the right to sublicense, through a protocol explicitly meant to be shared on other people's websites?
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.
drivingmenuts · 2h ago
Perhaps we should start naming the companies/individuals that image licenses are purchased from, as well as the license type, so that people will be better informed about the sourcing of images. I feel like we should be allowed to know who is being aggressive towards consumers.
melasadra · 3h ago
Now that everyone knows he's an easy mark. He's going to have his entire archive thoroughly combed by these trolls and can expect further shakedowns in the future.
nothinghere789 · 6h ago
This sounds a lot like a copyright troll or someone doing a similar grift
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.
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?
Look at the famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case. Google scanned every work they could put their hands on and showed excerpts to searching users. Copying and distribution on an incredible scale! Yet, they get to argue that it won't substitute in the marketplace (the snippets are too small to prevent people buying a book), it's a transformative use (this is about searching books not reading books), and the actual disclosed text is small (even if the copying in the backend is large scale).
On the other hand, fair dealing is purpose specific. Those enumerated purposes vary across jurisdictions and India's seems broadish (I live in a different fair dealing jurisdiction). Reading s52 your purposes are:
- private or personal use, including research
- criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work
- reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public.
Within those confines, you then get to argue purpose (e.g. how transformative), amount used, market effect, nature of the copyrighted work, etc. But if your use doesn't fall into the allowed purposes, you're out of luck to begin with.
I'm not familiar enough with Indian common law to know if the media clips those youtubers you mentioned should fall within the reporting purpose. I'm sure the answer would be complex. But all of this is to say, we often treat the world like it has one copyright law (one of the better ones) when that's not the case! Something appreciated by TFA.
The big one being transformative use is fair-use in the US but not India.
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.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tag/prenda-law/
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.
Like imagine the thumbnail were fetched every time a link appeared in someone's Facebook/Twitter feed. That could be tens of millions of hits easy.
Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
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.
It kind of irritated me that he immediately capitulated in a case that was obviously frivolous. Then posted it; has he no shame?
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.
No comments yet
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright
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.
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.
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.