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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

I am reminded of an story posted here on HN many years ago about a professional photographer who published photos under cc by-nc with an option to buy for commercial use. The amount of infringements online were massive to the point where they had no chance to even respond to them all, and most of the time when they did inform an infringer who used the content on websites or advertisement campaigns the company either removed the content or ignored the author.

The amount of piracy done by companies is pretty significant and there is sadly not many ways to prevent it.

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Funny enough, when Yo do license something, folks on the internet won’t believe you. A few years ago we licensed an amazing animation we found on dribble and folks on Twitter accused us of stealing and removing the artists name...

Enough people accusing you of this that it actually got under your skin?

If I created an amazing enough animation that random strangers on twitter recognized it... I mean, I'd say that if you're getting called out for using it and removing the artists name that's pretty amazing in general even if it sucks in this specific instance.

I find it shocking that strangers would actually stand up for an artist on the internet that seems to be having their work used without permission. Shocking in a good way.

Easy enough to address I hope with a note from the artist, though maybe I underestimate how fast Twitter dog piles happen...

> Easy enough to address I hope with a note from the artist, though maybe I underestimate how fast Twitter dog piles happen...

I think this is general behavior on twitter. Users try to come up with dirt or something to be angry about.

Is there a technical issue where an authoritative source responding to the issue gets obscured? That sounds kind of intentional. If people are only replying to the claim and never even see the authoritative proof it seems very bad.

Maybe it's a Hard Problem. I've seen people send me twitter links as evidence and it's just embarrassingly wrong. Like the sources in the twitter posts didn't even say something related to the claim the twitter post did. It was weird that it was viewed so uncritically by people quite familiar with the internet in general.

>I find it shocking that strangers would actually stand up for an artist on the internet that seems to be having their work used without permission. Shocking in a good way.

This happens a lot. Artists have followers who like them and want them to succeed, and those followers will get mad and notify the artist if their images are being sold/used illegally.

It seems like people have normalised "paying in exposure" (by keeping the artist's name), and the fact that someone actually pays for art is outrageous...

Last night I was looking up CNC controller boards for sale online. Many of them come with Mach3 software, with instructions to copy a special 'L1c3nse.dat' file to your C:\Mach3 folder.

Seems legit.

You should look into using Grbl instead. It probably ends up cheaper and certainly gives you more control.

I recently did this myself: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/6040-cnc-grbl-arduino...

Yep, I bought a Grbl board. Still, the accepted amount of piracy around Mach3 is surprising. There's a whole cottage industry based around pirating that software.

Nice build btw.

Yeah, I bought a Mathematica 12 license from a company on eBay for $100 recently. I figured maybe they acquired it in some sort of liquidation sale, or something. $100 wouldn't be an unreasonable price in that context, since it typically sells for around $350 for a personal / hobbyist licence. Turns out they want you to download the app from some shady site that has nothing to do with Wolfram Research, then email them for a license code.

Yeaaaahh, no. I know you're asking me to download some pirated shit and then just running a keygen. I could do that myself for free if I was interested. No, thanks.

All I'm really wondering now is if there's anyone other than Wolfram Research and eBay that I should report this to.

There are, you hire a company to track down public usage, and scaring infringers into reparative licensing fees with the threat of court time. I think we all hate these companies, but they have a place if their methods are fair (eg let you C&D without payment if the usage isn't too gross).

Seems pretty trivial to automate too. There are an abundance of search APIs, content detection has gotten easier, and keywords probably get you 90% of the way there.

You can automate the detection but if you try to automate the scare-o-gram you can come across as a scammy douchebag. It can hurt business if you start threatening nunneries and schools, and persistent threats could be considered harassment; get you in trouble.

As much as I hate agents, they're good for taking flack. You can publicly fire them if they make children cry, etc. You'll still want to keep an eye on them but might be worth the disengagement just for general mental-load purposes. Let you focus on direct customers rather than even worrying about infringement.

I agree 100%.

The big players in the content ID space have turned the practice into something inhuman.

I think this would better serve long tail, mom and pop. In the hands of media empires and conglomerates, it just wantonly hurts people.

Some photographer-lawyer pairs in Germany turned this into a business model. I got in trouble for not following a very specific citation format.

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