MusicBrainz (CC0 licensed music metadata project, think Wikidata for music) announced today that they prevailed against Philpot <https://blog.metabrainz.org/2019/06/25/we-were-sued-by-a-copyright-troll-and-we-prevailed/> and had a court dismiss the suit with prejudice. Some discussion (including Nemo mentioning this thread, thanks!) is happening on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/vrandezo/status/1143548566775853056>. Myself and other Wikimedians are also MusicBrainz contributors, and I'm pretty sure even more of us are consumers through Amazon/last.fm/Spotify/etc. so it would be nice if we could figure out their remaining concerns with using images from Commons, and a way forward. -- Legoktm On 4/24/19 3:58 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) via Commons-l wrote:

I went through my list again on Courtlistener (if someone has a PACER account, please contribute more relevant documents). Philpot seems to have rushed to voluntarily dismiss a number of cases at the end of April 2019. Possibly not coincidental, this happened mere days after the judgement in Philpot v. WOS. So, maybe a good precedent helps reduce confusion and litigation. That is (surprisingly for Texas?) the most balanced of the Philpot cases I've seen so far. <https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.txwd.938619/gov.uscourts.txwd.938619.43.0.pdf> Luckily the judge has not followed the steps of some obscenely bad previous cases. You find everything you may expect: * earning just 10 $ in ads from an article make the usage prima facie commercial; * a concert photo is probably original; * you probably can't copy an entire photo verbatim and then claim the usage was insubstantial; * that the photographer is usually a volunteer with no income from his work is relevant but doesn't make his copyright unactionable; * it can matter if you at least try to give reasonable attribution, for instance with a link to the file description; * you can't just speculate on the other person's practices and motives to get their copyright registration or other right summarily invalidated. So, let's pick some suitable precedents with reasonable conclusions as example to inform contributors and reusers about their rights and the (often very simple) steps which help stay safe. For instance, it's clear that linking back the file description on Commons never harms, even if it might not be sufficient. Federico