A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
61 comments
·July 23, 2025superasn
This is the new source of income and a lot of media orgs are getting paid - take ANI in India.
Theyve been hitting YouTubers like Mohak Mangal, Nitish Rajput, Dhruv Rathee with copyright strikes for using just a few seconds of news clips which you would think is fair use.
Then they privately message creators demanding $60000 to remove the strikes or else the channel gets deleted after the third strike.
It s not about protecting content anymore it's copyright extortion. Fair use doesn't matter. System like Youtube makes it easy to abuse and nearly impossible to fight.
It s turning into a business model: pay otherwise your channels with millions of subs get deleted
[1] https://the420.in/dhruv-rathee-mohak-mangal-nitish-rajput-an...
kirrent
'Which you would think is fair use' - I must admit I wouldn't think that. When I consider Indian content creators making use of clips from Indian media organisations I can't really imagine why Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions, wouldn't apply. Sure, you get to argue the strike on Youtube using their DMCA based system, but that has no legal bearing on your liability under Indian law.
I really like this aspect of US copyright law. I think the recent Anthropic judgement is a great example of how flexible US law is. I wish more jurisdictions would adopt it.
dartharva
> Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions
Are they really? I've been believing the opposite. What fair use does US allow that India doesn't?
kirrent
Very different in character. The US fair use four factor test (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/) is really flexible. You don't need to fall into an enumerated exception to infringement to argue that your use is transformative, won't substitute in the marketplace, etc.
Look at the famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case. Google scanned every work they could put their hands on and showed excerpts to searching users. Copying and distribution on an incredible scale! Yet, they get to argue that it won't substitute in the marketplace (the snippets are too small to prevent people buying a book), it's a transformative use (this is about searching books not reading books), and the actual disclosed text is small (even if the copying in the backend is large scale).
On the other hand, fair dealing is purpose specific. Those enumerated purposes vary across jurisdictions and India's seems broadish (I live in a different fair dealing jurisdiction). Reading s52 your purposes are:
- private or personal use, including research
- criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work
- reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public.
Within those confines, you then get to argue purpose (e.g. how transformative), amount used, market effect, nature of the copyrighted work, etc. But if your use doesn't fall into the allowed purposes, you're out of luck to begin with.
I'm not familiar enough with Indian common law to know if the media clips those youtubers you mentioned should fall within the reporting purpose. I'm sure the answer would be complex. But all of this is to say, we often treat the world like it has one copyright law (one of the better ones) when that's not the case! Something appreciated by TFA.
lesuorac
https://bytescare.com/blog/fair-use-copyright-india-vs-us
The big one being transformative use is fair-use in the US but not India.
giantrobot
> It s not about protecting content anymore it's copyright extortion.
It's always been about copyright extortion.
jim201
“This undermines the entire point of the open graph protocol (at least for images). If you have to manually review every image that you include then what's the point in it being a machine protocol?”
Bingo.
Ianal but it feels like if you provide an image via an open graph link, you’re implicitly licensing that image to consumers of the Open Graph protocol to be displayed alongside a link/link metadata.
If the media company didn’t have the rights to relicense that image for consumption via Open Graph and/or the original licensor didn’t want their images appearing via Open Graph, that media company shouldn’t be using Open Graph.
That is such a frustrating situation. I hope the courts would have ruled in your favor but I understand why you chose not to test it.
ChrisMarshallNY
Wonder if it was like that law firm that Ars Technica wrote about[0], that seeded porn videos, then went after people who downloaded them.
Things did not end well, for that lot.
wombatpm
Prenda Law. They ended up disbarred and in jail eventually. But it took a Federal Judge calling bullshit in open court and making personal referrals to the IRS, the DOJ, and the various State Bar Associations.
n8cpdx
The problem with paying ransoms is that even if it actually is the most cost effective solution in any one case, it just creates the incentive for more rapacious behavior.
I think I'd be willing to pay $800 of my time to disincentivize that behavior.
adfm
It’s a shakedown scam. IANAL and all that. Gaming it tells me it’s easier to remove the offending focus and ignore them until they send another nastygram. Never directly reply. Dave’s not here, man. Anybody doing this bullshit over an open graph image is looking for a mark. Generally, that’s why there are three strikes policies, etc. Why engage until they initiate? You speak through lawyers and they really have to have a real case or they’re wasting money because this is purely not malicious or profit seeking.
nocoiner
I am still not clear on what Open Graph is or how the image was used here. Some visual aids would have helped tremendously. I assume it is how a specific thumbnail is included alongside an embedded tweet or article snippet?
From what I can gather, it sounds like his copyright exposure came up when he exported his Twitter archive, including the image in question, and hosted (and, crucially, published) it on his own server. Am I thinking about this the right way?
dbetteridge
Open graph essentially provides thumbnails and title data for a news article or publication as links, so the news article returned a header image that displays in the tweet "preview"
In this case the Tweet would have been
> TWEET > linked article with open graph image
When exported the author then returned that same open graph info on their personal site, thus rendering a copyrighted image without a license.
Retr0id
Notably, Twitter also re-hosts opengraph thumbnail images via their image CDN (as would just about any other site or app that processes opengraph embeds)
Kilenaitor
To elaborate with some context: large sites do this to avoid hammering a small site if posts containing the link go viral.
Like imagine the thumbnail were fetched every time a link appeared in someone's Facebook/Twitter feed. That could be tens of millions of hits easy.
brailsafe
> But ultimately, the easiest and cheapest option for me was still to pay. The chance that it was taken further and the potential cost in terms of money, time, energy from me was too high, higher than the license fee — even if I didn't feel it was justified. So I paid the fee and moved on.
Although it's an interesting and relevant writeup/intellectual property conundrum, I'd feel like the move would have at most been to pull the archive offline and delete or mark the email as spam, assuming the unlikely case that it's not actually automated extortion. There's a few likely angles I thought about hypothetically having taken, but ultimately I firmly don't believe my lack of having read an email or my actual mail constitutes having taken any action at all. If I was interested enough in the problem, I'd just let them decide to track me down some other way afterward. Things are only as enforceable as they are.
That said, I've had collections calls ending up in my voicemail for years, and they are sure as hell not getting paid and haven't tried to take me to court afaik.
Edit: Incidentally, I quite like the dynamic background graphic. A neat art style and reminds me of recent macos backgrounds.
protocolture
This feels a lot like reading a technical description of someone choosing to pay an african prince. This is just extortion.
dolmen
OpenGraph allows to get a preview of the content. Allowing access to that preview is implicit and it looks fair to access the image from the media site.
However, republishing that preview elsewhere is still publishing and the author of the post seems to have missed that. Instead he should just publish the link to the media site and let the client that browse his archive access (download) the OpenGraph preview by itself.
Twitter/X does that republishing, but having the license for that republishing is their problem.
I'm curious to know if that preview was part of the Twitter archive. Because it doesn't qualify as "your" content.
dolmen
A technical solution would be to implement the OpenGraph preview on the client side (JS), instead of having the preview in the archive and hosted/served by it.
maverwa
I am unsure if this really would work legally, let alone stopping a licensor from demanding money from you in the first place. Does is really matter where the image is served from? If its displayed on your website, does it really matter if its client side JS or static HTML that renders the img tag? I think neither does it matter if you load the image from your own server or from a remote (the original OpenGraph source).
scosman
Title is a bit misleading. They did use the image on twitter, but the company asked for a license fee for re-publishing it on their personal website in the form of a twitter archive.
slimebot80
True. Open graph images imply the expectation of it being used by third parties, and as others have said - they chose a little guy to bully but would never do this to X.
Thorrez
Was the image hotlinked? Or was it copied and rehosted instead? I think that's an important consideration in image copyright cases like this.
Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
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dbetteridge
Sucks that companies do this but seems like it's inline with the law
basically they're not going to get anything from Twitter with their army of lawyers but once you hosted it on your own website you became personally liable to hold a license for any images your site displayed.
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ChrisMarshallNY
Just a caution: Many "Free" images are likely actually scraped. I've learned to be careful. I usually use images from only a couple of places (including paid sources), because I really don't trust many "royalty-free" image sources. I have also taken to providing source links in the image captions.
One of the good things (maybe) about AI-generated images, is that you could generate an image that only exists for your article. The rub is that the generator may be giving you an image that is close enough to a copyrighted one, that you could still be sued.
I think that fonts could have the same problem.
My initial reaction to this is that the licensor is a scammer and the author just got fleeced. I don’t know much about the law in the UK, but this tactic is almost identical to the one media licensing companies in the US used to go after old ladies whose grandkids had torrented movies on their internet connections. At least in the US there are many jurisdictions now where those types of cases are just immediately thrown out.
The main difference I see here is the author got bit by an automated tool. It really should be more or less considered a clerical error. I don’t see how paying $1000 is easier or cheaper than just showing up to court if asked and arguing your use was both easy to occur by mistake and didn’t represent anywhere near that value. This strategy has several advantages, among them being not having to pay until the court has ruled, which is a huge deterrent to shops like this. Just being willing to go to court automatically lowers the price you’ll end up paying. But if you don’t show that willingness you’re paying full price, even with the fakery about the 10% discount.