Copyright troll

A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, generally 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 of high statutory damages 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 "patent trolls", 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, which collect royalties and enforce copyrights of its members.

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 for statutory damages 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, 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 in 2006, after posting content they knew would be indexed by Google's Googlebot spider, with the industry standard "noindex" opt-out tags deliberately omitted. After 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.

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Wikipedia