Copyright trolls bully Dutch author so much he stops blogging
Ray Kluun has stopped blogging … for now.
The author of Love Life keeps being bombarded with ridiculously high copyright claims over images that he naïvely had been plucking off Google Images in the past to adorn his postings.
In a message that replaces his blog’s frontpage he explains:
Bloggers who borrowed from Google Images in the past have been declared outlawed. Unfortunately I (and many others with me) only found this out recently. All of this has cost me thousands of euros and lots of irritation. Of course I have stopped publishing photos [on this blog] for this reason.
It is however pretty much impossible to remove all photos that I have added to postings on kluun.nl since 2003. I would have to check thousands of articles and remove the photos one by one.
Basic legal tenets, such as the right to a fair trial and the right to a punishment proportional to the wrongdoing have been thrown out the window in the Netherlands in the past few years where it comes to intellectual property. There is an entire cottage industry of so-called copyright trolls who scour the web for infringements. If they find one, the send out bills ten times the price of the license or more. These companies even have their own go-to court, the one of The Hague, where especially judge Chris Hensen is a good friend of the copyright industry.
(Illustration: screenshot of Kluun’s website)
Een beetje hypocriet dat een van Nederlands beroemdste schrijvers die zelf dagelijks met copyright te maken heeft, pretendeert niet te weten dat je niet zomaar foto’s van het internet mag plukken zonder toestemming. Als hij zijn huiswerk had gedaan, en gewoon netjes had gevraagd of hij die foto’s mocht gebruiken, ben ik ervan overtuigd dat hij zeker 95% van de foto’s met toestemming gratis had kunnen gebruiken.
Kluun ging er gewoon vanuit dat ze die foto’s toch niet zouden vinden.
Eigen schuld, dikke bult. Wie zijn billen brandt, moet op de blaren zitten.
Ik vraag me af wat Kluun ervan zou vinden als anderen zonder toestemming en zonder naamsvermelding zomaar passages uit zijn boeken zouden kopiëren…