A new word was coined in the Netherlands today, “Citrix files” meaning not files stored in Citrix, but “Citrix traffic jams”. Actual, too many cars on the road style traffic jams that is. At issue is a vulnerability in Citrix software, used by many organisations to allow their people remote access to work files. Ministries, hospitals etc all use it. Because of the vulnerability all ministries that have it closed down their Citrix access, meaning all their people need to come into the office this Monday to be able to access their work files. This adds to the Monday morning rush hour, causing additional traffic jams: Citrix traffic jams.
A traffic jam in the Netherlands presumably means large numbers of pushbikes
@ton Wow, that shows how big remote work already is!
From copyright infringement…
Last week I received a copyright infringement notice, which I didn’t see until today as it arrived in a mailbox I didn’t check while my laptop was away for repairs. Back in January last year I posted about a new word ‘Citrix traffic jams’ (traffic james caused by Citrix security issues, meaning usual home workers went to their organisations offices en masse causing a much bigger morning rush hour). I added a screenshot of the news article to my blogpost, showing the title with that novel term ‘Citrix traffic jam’.
What I didn’t pay attention to was the image on which that headline was superimposed. That image of course was made by someone, in this case the Dutch Pro Shots news photo collective. My screenshot was intended as a quote of that headline, but contained the full news image. For that I received an invoice last week. At 120,- Euros it wasn’t cheap, certainly not relative to this being a personal blog with very limited readership, but they are of course within their rights. After checking out the company functioning as an intermediary for the photographer to see whether it looked legit (the mail they sent was somewhat spammy, equating copyright infringement with theft which is total BS), I paid. Mea culpa. I paid only for the past use of the image, and not for further use, so I deleted the screenshot from my blogpost.
…to copyright claimant
Then I remembered that in the summer of 2019 I had come across the unlicensed use by a commercial news site of one of my images, an image of my late mother. My images are generally available under a Creative Commons License for non-commercial use that requires attribution and sharing under the same conditions. That wasn’t the case here (though they did attribute the image to me). So I sent them an invoice, which was never paid. A few days later, using TinEye.com I found several other news sites that had the same content, although they belonged to different commercial entities.
So, after paying my invoice for infringement, I have now created an account with Copytrack and submitted claims to three commercial sites for using my image in 4 different publications (there is another I remember, but I can’t find it back yet).
With a bit of luck, those commercial users of my image cough up enough to financially compensate for my mistake from a year ago.