First things first: Flickr's new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: "Failure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed."

https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines

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If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, here's how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:

https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404057906068-How-to-report-Community-Guidelines-violations

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Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses "terminate automatically upon any breach" - that is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299

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Core to the CC licenses is the idea of *attribution*. When you use a CC image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users don't understand this; they use an image and add something like "Image: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commons" with no links or specific licenses.

Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a "breach" which "terminates" the CC license. That's where the copyleft trolls come in.

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Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.

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This is deeply unethical conduct. As I wrote when *I* was targeted by one of these creeps:

> If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use.

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> If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

Unethical as this conduct is, it's also big business. One company, #Pixsy, is responsible for a long-running shakedown campaign, working with scammy photographers to send out demand letters to unsuspecting Creative Commons users.

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And many of those photographers rely on Flickr to bait their traps.

There's a reason for this. Flickr's early years were a period of enormous innovation. Flickr was the first mobile photo-sharing site, and it invented numerous community features that turned it into a thriving hub for photographers, amateur and professional alike.

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Flickr was also an #interoperability pioneer, offering an API that let any user move their photos to a rival service - a tacit pledge to keep your business by being better than the rest, not by locking you in.

I know all this because I was an early advisor to Flickr, and because, in a weird way, I am partially responsible for Flickr. You see, before Flickr,

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I was carrying on a long-distance relationship from San Francisco with a woman in London, and we were both alpha testers for a social game called #GameNeverending.

One day over breakfast with GNE's founder #StewartButterfield, he asked me how things were going in my romantic life. I answered that things were great, but mentioned that my girlfriend and I were struggling to share the pictures we took in our daily lives with one another.

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Stewart said, "Well, there's a photo-sharing feature for GNE on the roadmap - why don't I bump it up and we'll see if other people use it, too?"

They did. In fact, the feature was so popular that within a few months, GNE relaunched as Flickr, jettisoning the game entirely and focusing on just that one feature. I stayed on the advisory, and one of the things I encouraged was the plan to roll out Creative Commons licenses for Flickr images.

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I made sure everyone knew about it when Flickr became the first CC-enabled image site.

(I also married the woman I was carrying on that long-distance relationship with and today we have a 15 year old daughter!)

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But after Flickr was sold to #Yahoo, it joined Yahoo's haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahoo's bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to #Verizon, who neglected them still further.

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