Posted on 01/26/2008 10:44:43 AM PST by LibWhacker
Maybe you can’t post a threatening letter, but perhaps you can post a cleverly worded response?
So someone gives me a letter but they retain ownership rights? Sounds like twisted logic.
Perhaps the recipient would have done better countersuing, arguing unauthorized use of his name and personal information in a copyrighted work.
Well that is an excellent suggestion. For that to work we probably needed this ruling. Lawyers helping lawyers, that’s all this decision is about. “Mobo-sphere”?? Oh, you mean citizens exercising their first ammendment rights?
One-sided article, that’s for sure, apparently written by Dozier, a party to the dispute. Still, if it’s even half-way accurate, it seems like it’s pretty bad news.
I’m not for people stealing intellectual property, but what about McDonald’s restaurant in Scotland, which had been in business for a hundred years, suddenly getting an extremely aggressive cease and desist letter from the fast food chain?
Totally nuts if you ask me. Hope it’s overturned.
I believe the copyrights were held to be invalid, allowing the sharks to freely pass along the documents.
All one has to do is just post the most threatening paragraph from the letter rather than the entire letter. Posting the nastiest part of the letter is a news reporting function and is protected by fair use provisions of copyright law.
Why would publishing a letter - sent via public mail and likely to be included in any publicly available court processes - be considered copyrighted?
Exactly.
This ruling is utter nonsense. If someone is using the legal system, the law and the legal processes being used are fair targets for public discussion. To have informed public discussion you need to have the source documents available.
This case is like moveon.org’s scheme to trademark its name and then use trademark protection to suppress criticism. Failed due to public outcry.
Shakespeare was right, Lawyers need to die now, as numerously and as horribly as possible, so that young people will be forever dissuaded from a career working for the dark side.
The fair use doctrine was totally settled until the entertainment industry decided they could make more money by unsettling it.
In the case at hand, copyrighting a cease-and-desist letter would prevent anyone else from claiming the text as his own. It does not prevent someone from posting attributed quotes from it on a website. If the self-interested lawyer is not totally misquoting the judge in this case, then the judge needs to be impeached for being a total moron.
Also covered at Techdirt.
He registered the copyright on that letter, and all the judge did was acknowledge the law, that a register of copyright is prima facie evidence of copyright. This wasn't even a copyright case about the C&D. It was just an abuse of the DMCA, leveraging the copyright of the C&D to reveal a poster's identity for another purpose.
And the test for Fair Use or First Amendment was never made. They would probably win since having all of our law out in the open is a time-honored tradition for ensuring fair process, and posting C&D letters on the WWW has been around for a while given the age of the WWW (I saw one first six years ago).
BTW, likely won’t be overturned since the defendant ran out of money.
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