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A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces
A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...
s it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation
Strategic litigation, also known as impact litigation, is the practice of bringing lawsuits intended to affect societal change. Impact litigation cases may be class action lawsuits or individual claims with broader significance, and may rely on st ...
, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences
In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was po ...
of high statutory damages
Statutory damages are a damage award in civil law, in which the amount awarded is stipulated within the statute rather than being calculated based on the degree of harm to the plaintiff. Lawmakers will provide for statutory damages for acts in w ...
provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works.
Both the term and the concept of a copyright troll began to appear in the mid-2000s. It derives from the pejorative
A pejorative word, phrase, slur, or derogatory term is a word or grammatical form expressing a negative or disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone or something. It is also used to express criticism, hosti ...
"patent troll
In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or ...
s", which are companies that enforce patent rights to earn money from companies that are selling products, without having products of their own for sale. It is distinguished from organizations such as ASCAP
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) () is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadc ...
, which collect royalties and enforce copyrights of their members.
Notable examples
One commentator describes Harry Wall, husband of nineteenth-century British comic singer Annie Wall, as the world's first copyright troll. Wall set up "the Authors', Composers' and Artists' Copyright Protection Office", to collect fees for unauthorized performances of works by composers (often deceased) based on the threat of litigation forstatutory damages
Statutory damages are a damage award in civil law, in which the amount awarded is stipulated within the statute rather than being calculated based on the degree of harm to the plaintiff. Lawmakers will provide for statutory damages for acts in w ...
under the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1842.
In the 2000s, the SCO Group's effort to obtain royalties in regards to the open source operating system Linux was viewed as copyright trolling by some of the approximately 1,500 companies from whom SCO demanded licensing royalties, based on a copyright that a court eventually ruled belonged instead to Novell
Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...
. Novell, by contrast, had no interest or intention of enforcing its copyright against the alleged infringers.
The term was also applied to two parties that separately sued Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
in 2006, after posting content they knew would be indexed by Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's Googlebot
Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler (to ...
spider, with the industry standard "noindex
The noindex value of an HTML robots meta tag requests that automated Internet bots avoid Search engine indexing, indexing a web page.Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google Inc.'', adult magazine ''Perfect 10'' was described as a copyright troll for setting up image links with the intent to sue Google for infringement after Google added them to its image search service. In '' Field v. Google'', a Nevada lawyer took "affirmative steps" to get his legal writings included in Google's search results so that he could sue Google, and was ruled to have acted in bad faith. More recently, the term has been used to describe entities that bring questionable claims against companies in the fashion industry over purported copyrights in fabric patterns. In 2021, the term was coined by a Belgian judge in reference to Permission Machine, which later changed its name to Visual Rights Group. This company scanned photos on the internet and sent large damage claims without asking for the removal of the material.
EFF: Copyright TrollsFight Copyright Trolls, an online publication covering mass file-sharing lawsuits in USA
{{Intellectual property activism Copyright law Criticism of intellectual property Pejorative terms
Righthaven cases
In 2010, copyright holding company Righthaven LLC was called a copyright troll by commentators, after it purchased copyrights to a number of old news articles from Stephens Media, at the time the publisher of the ''Las Vegas Review-Journal
The ''Las Vegas Review-Journal'' is a daily subscription newspaper published in Las Vegas, Nevada, since 1909. It is the largest circulating daily newspaper in Nevada and one of two daily newspapers in the Las Vegas area.
The ''Review-Journal' ...
'', based on a business model
A business model describes how a Company, business organization creates, delivers, and captures value creation, value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-pub ...
of suing bloggers and other Internet authors for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission.
The matter was covered by the ''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'', ''Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg T ...
'', ''Wired News
''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in publication since its l ...
'', '' Mother Jones'', ''The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
'', the ''Boston Herald
The ''Boston Herald'' is an American conservative daily newspaper whose primary market is Boston, Massachusetts, and its surrounding area. It was founded in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States. It has been awarde ...
'', and other newspapers and news blogs, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties.
It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...
, which offered to assist the defendants. The paper's competitor, the ''Las Vegas Sun
The ''Las Vegas Sun'' is one of the Las Vegas Valley's two daily subscription newspapers. It is owned by the Greenspun family and is affiliated with Greenspun Media Group. The paper published afternoons on weekdays from 1990 to 2005 and is now ...
'', covered all 107 of the lawsuits as of September 1, 2010, describing it as the first known instance of a copyright troll buying the rights to a news story based on finding that its copyright had been infringed. ''The Review-Journal''WEHCO Media
WEHCO Media, Inc., based in Little Rock, AR is a privately held media company with holdings that include newspapers, cable television systems, and internet service. Walter E. Hussman Jr. is the chairman. Hussmann is the grandson of Clyde E. Pa ...
in Arkansas to pursue similar actions, and announced that it was in negotiation with a number of other publishers. ''Wired
Wired may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976
* ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993
* ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017
* "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street''
* "Wired ...
'' magazine described the activity as "borrowing a page from the patent trolls", and noted that the company was demanding $75,000 from each infringer, and agreeing to settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant.
In April 2011, a Colorado court ruled in ''Righthaven v. Hill'' that:
: "Although Plaintiff's business model relies in large part upon reaching settlement agreements with a minimal investment of time and effort, the purpose of the courts is to provide a forum for the orderly, just, and timely resolution of controversies and disputes. Plaintiff's wishes to the contrary, the courts are not merely tools for encouraging and exacting settlements from Defendants cowed by the potential costs of litigation and liability."
By the second half of 2011, defendants with resources to fight Righthaven in court were winning cases on grounds that their usage fell within the fair use
Fair use is a Legal doctrine, doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to bal ...
doctrine and that Stephens Media had actually not assigned full ownership of the copyrighted material to Righthaven. Righthaven was also sanctioned by at least one judge for failing to disclose that Stephens Media got a 50 percent cut of any lawsuit proceeds involving the ''Review-Journal.'' Successful defendants demanded court costs and legal fees, which Righthaven refused to pay. By December 2011, Righthaven was insolvent and on the auction block.
Legal defense
Two lawyers have provided a framework for a legal defense against copyright trolls. Since most of the lawsuits about online copyright infringement rely on a minimal amount of information that targets non-infringers as well as infringers, there are ways to defend against the lawsuit by defense lawyers and ''pro se'' defendants that are described in the framework.See also
*Copyfraud
A copyfraud is a false copyright claim by an individual or institution with respect to content that is in the public domain. Such claims are unlawful, at least under US and Australian copyright law, because material that is not copyrighted is fr ...
*Patent troll
In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or ...
* Prenda Law
*Trademark troll
Trademark troll is a pejorative term for any entity that attempts to register a trademark without intending to use it and who then threatens to sue others who use that mark. As a traditional troll is said to collect a toll from those trying to cro ...
* SAD Scheme
*Vexatious litigation
Vexatious litigation is legal action which is brought solely to harass or subdue an adversary. It may take the form of a primary frivolous lawsuit or may be the repetitive, burdensome, and unwarranted filing of meritless motions in a matter whic ...
References
External links
EFF: Copyright Trolls
{{Intellectual property activism Copyright law Criticism of intellectual property Pejorative terms