What To Do About CC License Violations?

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 28, 2010 @06:01AM from the put-your-feet-in-these-stirrups dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In the past, I've seen my pictures used by big commercial companies despite the Creative Commons license that clearly limits them to non-commercial use. I just let it slide because a friend who's a lawyer says that all I can do is sue. They've ignored emails and comments. Today, I saw two other examples that show this is pretty rampant. These big commercial corporations are some of the most tech savvy publications around, but they just grabbed the image. One, BoingBoing, even reprinted the 'non-commercial' clause, warning others to stay away. But they've got their ads from Cheerios, HP and Mazda running alongside. Does anyone care that we've gone to all this trouble to create new, more flexible licenses? Does it even matter when very smart people just flip the bird to the license? Is the only alternative to sue? I wouldn't mind asking for $150k and settling for $1 for each copy made, but that seems a bit crazy. I hate to type out DMCA notices but their attitude is that only uncool people complain about this and I should be happy about the publicity. Then they can be happy about not sharing their ad revenue with artists or photographers. What can I do?" Update: 08/30 18:39 GMT by T : (Very belated; mea culpa.) Cory Doctorow writes: "The anonymous submitter is not the creator of the photo. The creator of that photo is Jennifer Trant, a friend and colleague of mine who has no trouble with my use of her photo. I have just gotten off the phone with her and confirmed that she did not submit the story and also that she is happy to have this photo on Boing Boing." The photo has since been added back to BoingBoing.

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Re:You'd think ... by vipvop · 2010-07-28 06:42 · Score: 0, Troll

How is Cory Doctorow's wife like his books? Both get picked up in airports, fingered through once to pass the time, and then left by the toilets.
Re:Why ask? by sexconker · 2010-07-28 08:15 · Score: 0, Troll

Wait, what? I actually don't pirate software. I don't download what I don't have permission (from the rights holder) to download.
Horse shit.
You're a dirty fucking pirate just like everyone else.
If you're squeaky clean like you claim, I'll run my scrotum through my shredder.