In January, Tim Riley and Liesl Rowe gave a webinar on the Return of the Copyright Trolls, an exploration into the ongoing issue of copyright trolling. A highlight of the session was the lively discussion from participants about their own battles with copyright trolls and what they were doing to prevent it.
Tim and Liesl are keen to compile responses from other institutions to get a better sense of how copyright trolling is affecting the HE community. To start doing this, they have crafted a survey, which can be accessed here. It will remain open until 31 March 2026.
For those unfamiliar, copyright trolling is the practice of legal firms aggressively asserting the copyright of clients, sending letters alleging copyright infringement to universities. Sometimes, these requests can concern public domain material or images where the ownership is more in question. Usually, though, they take the form of letters threatening legal action which are received by senior members of university staff.
Tim and Liesl are looking for responses from people working in a copyright role or anyone who handles copyright trolling requests, either in Higher Education or related educational non-profit organisation in the UK or overseas. If this is your role, they would love to hear from you. Alternatively, do share the survey with any relevant colleagues. Even if your organisation has not had any direct experience with copyright trolls, they would still like to hear from you. They ask that you limit your responses to one response per organisation if possible.
The survey is completely anonymous. If you do supply any identifying data in any of the free-text responses, they will anonymise this before sharing any survey results. There is a full consent statement at the start of the survey, but do let them know if you have any further questions or concerns.
When the survey closes, members of the ALT CoOLSIG will analyse the responses and report back findings to the community. They also plan to use the research to produce some best-practice resources to help people across the sector deal with trolling requests.
Copyright Literacy 