Litigant Uses Old Creative Commons License to Sue Unsuspecting Users
A new litigant has come to our attention due to the filing of lawsuits against several educational institutions this year. Ajay Suresh ("Suresh") has filed lawsuits against Long Island University ("LIU"), Rhode Island School of Design ("RISD"), and the Pratt Institute ("PI" or "Pratt") in the last month, and they are added to a list of 30 other defendants he has sued over the last 3 years. We have reported on several serial copyright litigants (also known colloquially as "copyright trolls") in the past, and this label may apply to Suresh.
Copyright Trolls are commonly understood to operate by posting copyrighted material, often pictures, on platforms that are generally friendly to open source material, such as Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. They post these images under a vague license, most commonly an older Creative Commons ("CC") license like CC 2.0, which makes the images appear to a copyright layman to be free to use. These images can be particularly dangerous because they are in fact free to use, provided that you include a very specific attribution. If you don't provide this attribution with your use, the license ceases to function and your use may be an infringement. The newest 4.0 version of Creative Commons licensing fixes this loophole by allowing accidental infringers 30 days upon notice to add or amend their attribution before the copyright owner can file a lawsuit. Unfortunately, it is still perfectly legal to share new images under an old CC license, and many copyright trolls exploit this. When a troll finds an instance where one of their images hasn't been properly attributed, they will send a cease-and-desist letter requesting an amount of money that is designed to be as much as possible while still being cheaper than a lawsuit, often several thousand dollars. If the infringer doesn't pay them, then a lawsuit follows, which almost always ends in a settlement. A history of these lawsuits can then help bring more pressure against unwitting infringers, making them more likely to give in to the demands. The surest sign of a copyright troll is the deliberate sharing of new images under an old license, such as the 20-year-old CC 2.0. If you want to use one of these images, take great care to fulfill all of the attribution requirements, or you may be the next victim to pay the troll's toll.
The aforementioned schools, LIU, RISD, and Pratt, each allegedly included one of Suresh's images on either a school web page or social media post without any attribution. LIU supposedly used one on their website, and after 3 separate correspondences that failed to resolve the issue, Suresh filed a Complaint. Is the RISD case, Suresh filed a Complaint after RISD posted one of his images on Twitter and they failed to resolve the matter out of court. In a similar manner to RISD, Pratt used one of Suresh's photos in a Facebook post and Suresh filed a Complaint after two attempts to resolve the issue out of court.
We leave it to the reader to judge whether trollish behavior is afoot here. There can be a fine line between defending one's valid copyright and taking advantage of less-sophisticated users of open source material. We will provide updates to these cases as they continue to evolve.