Tag: trolling

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Today I received a copyright infringement notice from ANP Photo, the Dutch photo press organisation, telling me I was using an image they hold the rights to on this site without a license. And suggesting I pay them 370,56 Euro for the privilege.

The image, that I used in a 2018 blogpost, is this one:


Image: European Space Agency, Creative Commons BY-SA

While ANP, despite its phase of being venture capital owned some time back, is generally seen as a respectable agency, this is a clear and unworthy attempt at license trolling.

ANP Photo contains over 100 million images, and the one above is indeed in their image bank as well, although it doesn’t surface if you use Mars and ESA as selection criteria.

Early on in this blog in the ’00s, I have occasionally used images wrongly and afaik that’s all corrected and no longer the case.

The problem here however is of course that ANP does not have the IP or licensing rights to the image that they claim.

In this site I mostly use images that I made myself, and otherwise use Creative Commons licensed images where the rights holder specifies the types of use you don’t need upfront permission or pay for.

This is one such image.

The image is of the Korolev crater on Mars, so there is no dispute about its source, because no one else had a camera, let alone a human being or photo journalist, in orbit around Mars at the time it was taken in November 2018: the European Space Agency.

That’s also where I got it from, directly from the ESA website, under a Creative Commons license and the clear conditions of having to attribute the image (‘BY’, by attribution, here done by linking and mentioning the source in the text) and sharing any derivative under the same conditions (‘SA’, share alike, here true by default because the image wasn’t altered), but otherwise to do with it as I see fit, even commercially.
If you follow that link to the image, and click on it you’ll see the download link ESA provides for different sizes, and a repeat of the Creative Commons licensing information underneath.
Just posting the image, without me adding links or attribution, would have been enough though, because that is also clearly stated in the image by ESA itself, in the bottom left corner where it says (c) ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY SA 3.0 IGO.

Even if that CC license would now no longer be there at the ESA web page and had been retracted, it would still mean nothing for this image, because CC licenses cannot be retroactively withdrawn or altered: the license that applied at the moment of use remains always applicable.

That same Creative Commons licensing statement is in the image that ANP holds in their image data base.
So a false claim by ANP, and a very disappointing one too.

There even is a potential argument to be made, a lawyer friend told me, that this image can’t be copyrighted as it was automatically taken without any real time human influence as to timing, angle, composition etc (the camera being on a time delay of 4 to 24 minutes between Earth and Mars after all). But I doubt that argument holds here: I assume the image is a selection and crop of a much bigger image, and that choice and selection probably clears the threshold for creativity in copyright law.

[UPDATE] After I responded to ANP that their infringement claim was license trolling they withdrew the claim, albeit without apology. I followed up with asking if they know how many other Creative Commons licensed or even public domain images they have in their 100 million+ database, given a number of public sources they include for their images, and if they know how many false claims and payments they made and received on those images. I bet the answer is they don’t know (nor care apparantly).

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In the past week or so I am receiving multiple Eventbrite confirmations for US political events, all of them Republican rallies or events on topics on their agenda. People are trolling such events by registering large numbers of fake attendees. And now they’re using my e-mail addresses listed on this site to do so. Likely because they appear in some online dump of known e-mail addresses to spam. All events are events listed on Eventbrite (for which I never used those addresses myself).

After a few registrations I deleted from my e-mail inbox without looking at them in detail (one was for a policing conference in LA or some such), I started collecting some screenshots.

I claimed the mail addresses today on Eventbrite and deleted the orders.

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We’re in a time where whatever is presented to us as discourse on Facebook, Twitter or any of the other platforms out there, may or may not come from humans, bots, or someone/a group with a specific agenda irrespective of what you say or respond. We’ve seen it at the political level, with outside influences on elections, we see it in things like gamer gate, and in critiques of the last Star Wars movie. It creates damage on a societal level, and it damages people individually. To quote Angela Watercutter, the author of the mentioned Star Wars article,

…it gets harder and harder to have an honest discussion […] when some of the speakers are just there to throw kerosene on a flame war. And when that happens, when it’s impossible to know which sentiments are real and what motivates the people sharing them, discourse crumbles. Every discussion […] could turn into a […] fight — if we let it.

Discourse disintegrates I think specifically when there’s no meaningful social context in which it takes place, nor social connections between speakers in that discourse. The effect not just stems from that you can’t/don’t really know who you’re conversing with, but I think more importantly from anyone on a general platform being able to bring themselves into the conversation, worse even force themselves into the conversation. Which is why you never should wade into newspaper comments, even though we all read them at times because watching discourse crumbling from the sidelines has a certain addictive quality. That this can happen is because participants themselves don’t control the setting of any conversation they are part of, and none of those conversations are limited to a specific (social) context.

Unlike in your living room, over drinks in a pub, or at a party with friends of friends of friends. There you know someone. Or if you don’t, you know them in that setting, you know their behaviour at that event thus far. All have skin in the game as well misbehaviour has immediate social consequences. Social connectedness is a necessary context for discourse, either stemming from personal connections, or from the setting of the place/event it takes place in. Online discourse often lacks both, discourse crumbles, entropy ensues. Without consequence for those causing the crumbling. Which makes it fascinating when missing social context is retroactively restored, outing the misbehaving parties, such as the book I once bought by Tinkebell where she matches death threats she received against the sender’s very normal Facebook profiles.

Two elements therefore are needed I find, one in terms of determining who can be part of which discourse, and two in terms of control over the context of that discourse. They are point 2 and point 6 in my manifesto on networked agency.

  • Our platforms need to mimick human networks much more closely : our networks are never ‘all in one mix’ but a tapestry of overlapping and distinct groups and contexts. Yet centralised platforms put us all in the same space.
  • Our platforms also need to be ‘smaller’ than the group using it, meaning a group can deploy, alter, maintain, administrate a platform for their specific context. Of course you can still be a troll in such a setting, but you can no longer be one without a cost, as your peers can all act themselves and collectively.

    • This is unlike on e.g. FB where the cost of defending against trollish behaviour by design takes more effort than being a troll, and never carries a cost for the troll. There must, in short, be a finite social distance between speakers for discourse to be possible. Platforms that dilute that, or allow for infinite social distance, is where discourse can crumble.

    This points to federation (a platform within control of a specific group, interconnected with other groups doing the same), and decentralisation (individuals running a platform for one, and interconnecting them). Doug Belshaw recently wrote in a post titled ‘Time to ignore and withdraw?‘ about how he first saw individuals running their own Mastodon instance as quirky and weird. Until he read a blogpost of Laura Kalbag where she writes about why you should run Mastodon yourself if possible:

    Everything I post is under my control on my server. I can guarantee that my Mastodon instance won’t start profiling me, or posting ads, or inviting Nazis to tea, because I am the boss of my instance. I have access to all my content for all time, and only my web host or Internet Service Provider can block my access (as with any self-hosted site.) And all blocking and filtering rules are under my control—you can block and filter what you want as an individual on another person’s instance, but you have no say in who/what they block and filter for the whole instance.

    Similarly I recently wrote,

    The logical end point of the distributed web and federated services is running your own individual instance. Much as in the way I run my own blog, I want my own Mastodon instance.

    I also do see a place for federation, where a group of people from a single context run an instance of a platform. A group of neighbours, a sports team, a project team, some other association, but always settings where damaging behaviour carries a cost because social distance is finite and context defined, even if temporary or emergent.

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    Some links I thought worth reading the past few days