[conspire] Book Burning continues thanks to the Feds

[Rick Moen]

Oops, I somehow snipped off my own concluding paragraph.  Appended.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:18:26 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [conspire] Book Burning continues thanks to the Feds
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> Yeah - what it means, as any IP Lawyer you hire will tell you, that if
> you try to sue for copyright infringment without registering with the
> LOC your up the creek without a paddle.

It means that, along with paying for your attorney's third daughter's
orthodontic work, you get to make out a $35 cheque as a sort of bit of
pixie dust sprinkled on top of the larger cheques.

> If you go by the rhetoric from the copyright crazies, mearly scanning
> and copying someing is infringment and it is all, thereofr, willfull.
> It is an intolerable situation.

Well, they have a selective incapacity for understanding the terms
'implied licence' and 'fair use'.

> You can sue for anything.

Quite.  And those courthouse steps hurt quite a bit when you're bounced
down them.

> I once told someone on the NYLUG list, in a thread far more boisterous
> than this one, on the subject of copyright, to stop copying my text in
> the message thread, and this was official notice of such a warning under
> US Copyright law, of a misuse  of my copyrighted published works on the
> NYLUG Mailing list.  The guy went balistic...
> 
> But I was legally right, and hopefully made the valid point.

You were 'legally right' only to the extent that you decided to ignore
the concepts of 'implied licence' and 'fair use'.  And it sounds like
you were arguing with a halfwit.  (In a medium where borrowing limited
amounts of your work is both customary and is necessary for proper
replying, such as this one, my purporting to forbid you from reusing
your text in quoted replies -- or vice-versa -- has no legal effect
whatsoever and would be an excellent way to get bounced down those cold,
hard steps.)