Is something like this enforceable?
That's why typically only companies try to enforce licenses.
The author said that even writing the blog post was hard because he had not much time to spare.
Imagine what it would cost if you sue and demand a newspaper like The Daily Mail.
Otherwise, you can always send them to collections for non-payment and/or hire a lawyer.
One of the things money seems to buy, which makes wealthy people/entities able to tackle problems that must of us realistically can't, is time.
I believe that in the end, the so-called rat-race is just a race to be free to have time, to do whatever you like to. Sure, some chains you will never be free of, but if you can shed enough chains off of you, you will have enough time to do other, more meaningful stuff, like defending your rights/intellectual property/privacy, etc.
In this case at least, it seems like the author finds it very hard to pursue this path, because in the end, what's in there for him? Maaaaaybe some money, after a long a emotionally tiring fight. On the other hand, you will lose time and money and potentially your health (since I don't see this route being stress-free).
In the end, like for most things, it ends up being a kind of personal-ROI thing. The return he sees is probably to low to be worth going after it, and the investment and risk too high.
And that's unfortunate, because in the end the abusive guys with money and time end up winning most battles :(
Someone would have to invest the time to create some structure to help the victims find each other but it should cost little to no money.
A lawyer might even find it lucrative to do this? It's like the advertisements I see asking if I've ever taken some drug or something if so I can join a class action law suit.
Finding each other is cheap, structuring such a case isn't.
No, it's not, because 1) the user never agreed to the license, 2) a license by definition cannot cover unlicensed uses. Unlicensed uses are dealt with by statute, not by a licence agreement, so it would be up to a court to decide how much to reward you.
Note that for 1) without a written agreement you can't specify additional license terms beyond the usual statutory rights. Licenses and contracts have very different requirements for what makes them valid, the bar is set much higher for licenses.
With a compulsory license, the fee is pre-determined by law or arbitration. However, in the US they are basically only applicable to music and similar works involving royalties.
In cases of piracy, damages are sought through civil suit and ultimately determined by the court, not the plaintiff. Essentially your warning amounts to "I'll sue you for X amount if you steal this". There's no guarantee that the court would find in your favor or award the full damages sought.
I say "warning" because I doubt many courts would consider this a valid EULA to begin with. Contracts of adhesion are generally enforceable only if the terms conform to the reasonable expectations of the signatory (who has no control over the terms).
But even if it were valid, and you were allowed to set your own violation fee, you would still have to go through the court to enforce it.
We'd better hope the general principle isn't, because otherwise every search engine, social networking site, traffic aggregator and directory service on the web is about to spend the rest of its very short existence fighting off lawsuits.
The complication with web sites is that there is inevitably some level of implied consent: if you put a site up and someone visits it normally, they are technically making various copies of your work along the way, without necessarily having any explicit permission from the rightsholder to do so. This is where lawyers argue technicalities about everything from hot-linking to uploading or downloading the latest Hollywood movie.
Sadly, the past few years have seen lawyers argue the minutiae of EU directives and national IP laws to the extent that any original intention or moral or economic justification for copyright has long been forgotten. Basically, this has become exactly the kind of area that gets lawyers and legal systems a bad reputation, where sometimes quite significant amounts of power are being assigned based on obscure technicalities in how laws at different levels of government have been drafted.
Think of it like crowd sourced lawyers to even up egregious abusers of the public commons.
The community can somehow [1] filter actions up to the top and then automatically start a crowd funding campaign to take legal action based upon such things.
Might work against patent trolls and other organisations that we all feel are acting badly but we feel powerless to do anything about. I'd put £100 down now toward a class action lawsuit against the Daily Mail for constantly stealing peoples content.
[1] technical term meaning I haven't thought this through properly
You can specify that it is not available (but good luck seeing anything from a case about violating the license).
You might be able to do this with something like £100, though, and just invoice them. I'd guess staff lawyers would say just pay it.