Trolls, Pixsies, and Poka-Yokes at WikiCon2024-10-10

Years ago, an entrepreneur paid low-wage workers to create thousands of stock photos to distribute with a free license. Many of them wound up on Wikimedia Commons. Then, if someone used the image but didn't follow the detailed instructions for proper attribution, he sent letters demanding money. See, even professional writers, editors, and publishers frequently make mistakes when using freely licensed images, forgetting that there are still requirements for attribution, documentation, linking, and so on. But it's not usually a problem because most of the time when someone releases an image with a free license it's because they want people to use the material and aren't looking to make money from license enforcement. "License enforcement as business model" is possible with a Creative Commons license, even if Creative Commons themselves condemns it as contrary to the spirit of the license.

When it came to the attention of the Wikimedia Commons community that someone was using the site to host material in order to extract money from reusers, the files were deleted. Sometime later, a concert photographer attracted some attention for similar behavior: using a complicated attribution statement and suing people who didn't reproduce it exactly. The Commons community took a novel approach to that case: "forced watermarking," editing each and every one of his uploads to include an ugly text box within the image with the correct attribution. But where is the line between "acceptable" license enforcement and the abusive type, frequently called "copyleft trolling?" What is the role of Wikimedia Commons or of Wikipedia when it comes to legal disputes between creators and users? These are blurry lines, and while the examples above were sufficiently clear-cut to spark outrage and prompt action, there are other users which fall into a gray area.

At this year's WikiConference North America in Indianapolis, I gave a talk about copyleft trolling, explaining the behavior and precedents but then reframing it as a design problem. Poka-yoke is a term developed at Toyota for "error-proofing." Looking critically at the MediaWiki interface, the software does a poor job of instructing media reusers how to properly follow license requirements -- a problem that may be worth fixing before trying to draw bright lines around behavior.

The talk was recorded and is available on YouTube: Trolls, Pixsies, and Poka-Yokes.