Update September 16: In response to our email, the person who emailed EFF apologized and promised to remove the image from the places where it was used. That's appreciated, though we also reiterated that EFF's content is licensed under CC-BY and can continue to be used pursuant to that license without further permission.

Earlier this week, EFF received an email claiming that our body-camera police officer illustration (shown in the banner above) violated the sender’s copyright in a graphic they used to illustrate a tweet (cropped screenshot shown on the right). The email demanded we remove the image or provide a link to their e-commerce website, which sells police body cameras. For those interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a link from EFF can be very beneficial to their page ranking. The funny thing was, the police officer illustration is an original EFF work.

It’s not a problem for someone to use our works in their own—they are available to the public under a Creative Commons attribution license—but that certainly doesn’t give a claim against our original. And their graphic had no attribution. (The Action Camera skateboarder illustration on the left appears to be an Adobe stock image.)

For EFF this was more amusing than threatening. We knew instantly that we needn’t worry about the implied threat, and if things went badly, we probably have more IP litigators per capita than any entity that’s not a boutique IP litigation firm. So we wrote back explaining the situation, and expect that will be the end of this.

But for many entities, it can be quite scary. Even if they are secure in their rights, the potential for a costly or time-consuming conflict may lead to a rational choice that a link is a low-cost solution. They might wonder if this misunderstanding will escalate into a DMCA takedown, potentially interfering with the availability of the page until the improper notice is resolved. Even if they disregard such a weak threat, dealing with it has the serious potential to take time away from running their operation.

We have not named the email’s sender. There is no indication that they are in the business of copyright trolling, it likely was a simple mistake, and we had no desire to use our platform to mobilize a shame campaign. Moreover, we’re well aware of the Streisand effect and see no need to provide the very link they seek in our discussion of why they shouldn’t have demanded a link. Instead, we hope that this example serves to show how copyright demands can be misused. Below is our response: