Beware the Copyleft Trolls

When photographers sue after Creative Commons Licenses go awry.

Chip Stewart
OneZero
Published in
5 min readMay 20, 2021

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A photographer posts their work online under an outdated Creative Commons license, such as version 2.0, that does not give licensees the right to fix license problems within 30 days of notice, as do the current CC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

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Chip Stewart
OneZero

Lawyer. Journalist. TCU professor. Viewer discretion is advised.