Techdirt Daily Email for Thursday, 15 July 2010

Techdirt Daily Email for Thursday, 15 July 2010

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Plastic Surgeon Sues Online Reviewers Who Gave Her Bad Reviews
(
Defamation
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
slapp-anyone-lately?
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 11:48PM

Alan Bleiweiss points us to the news of a plastic surgeon, Kimberly Henry, in Marin, California, who is not at all happy that some people wrote bad reviews of her work on Yelp and DoctorScorecard. You can see the
Yelp reviews
and
DoctorScorecard reviews
to see for yourself. It’s true that some of them are really quite scathing. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to respond to such things… and Dr. Henry has chosen to
sue all of her critics
for ” libel and defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with prospective economic advantage” and is “seeking $1 million in general damages, $1 million in special damages, unspecified punitive damages, legal costs, injunctions against the reviewers and restraining orders.”

Similar lawsuits in the past have ended poorly — especially in California where there are pretty well-defined anti-SLAPP laws that protect commenters from abusive lawsuits designed to silence criticism. Of course, if the comments actually are defamatory, that might be a different story. If you look at the DoctorScorecard reviews, it’s interesting to see some of the reviews have responses from Dr. Henry’s office claiming that what’s said in the reviews are not true, and there’s some back and forth on some of the reviews. It’s also interesting to note that DoctorScorecard handed over the IP and email addresses of commenters when asked — with the guy who runs the site later admitting he didn’t realize that he didn’t have to do that (and that he no longer does just hand over the info).

2 Comments

MTA Pretends ‘Unlimited’ Means 90
(
Failures
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
math-is-hard
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 9:44PM

We’ve seen how broadband providers and mobile carriers have regularly been confused by the term
unlimited
, and now it appears that the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is going down the same road. To deal with its budget crunch the MTA is planning to say that
its unlimited ride cards are actually quite limited
. A monthly “unlimited” card will get you 90 rides. A weekly one will get you 21 rides. Basically, “unlimited” means 3 rides per day. As someone who spends a lot of time in NY, and frequently gets unlimited weekly cards, I know I use it more than 21 times in a week, especially when I’m bouncing around from meeting to meeting during a day. The MTA might want to be careful, of course. Companies
have been fined
for falsely stating unlimited when things are not actually unlimited.

5 Comments

Is The Entertainment Industry Doing Itself Any Favors With Ridiculous Loss Claims?
(
Copyright
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
doubtful
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 7:44PM

The entertainment industry is famous for its bogus stats, claiming massive losses from things like file sharing. However, when those reports are looked at by any
credible source
, it’s not hard to realize they’re totally bogus. This also comes up in various lawsuits. For example, a Russian torrent tracker was shut down, and the operators of the site are now being accused
of causing $1.25 billion (with a b) in losses
for the movie industry. This is substantiated by… well… absolutely nothing other than movie studios insisting that it’s true. I’m curious as to why they do this, because when they put forth such unbelievable numbers, it seems like they’re only hurting themselves. No one believes that such numbers are even close to true and it just makes it that much more difficult to take them seriously. Then again, maybe they’re just using some
Hollywood accounting
to figure out those losses…

14 Comments

David Lynch Tries Crowdfunding His Next Movie
(
Movie Industry
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
will-it-have-backwards-speaking-midgets?
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 5:41PM

We’ve seen plenty of stories about crowdfunded movies, but most have been by little known filmmakers. There was some talk about how Kevin Smith might
crowdfund
his
Red State
project, but after the success of
Cop Out
, traditional movie financiers stepped in and did the deal instead. So it’s interesting to see another well known filmmaker testing the waters on crowdfunding.
Shocklee
points us to the news that
David Lynch is going to experiment with crowdfunding
a new documentary. It’s a pretty simple crowdfunding setup. No tiers. Just one price: $50. And with that you get to
choose
between a limited edition print (a self-portrait by Lynch), a t-shirt or a tote bag. I’m sure plenty will pay up, though, I’m surprised he didn’t try more interesting tiers — at both higher and lower prices.

13 Comments

A Paywall… For Obituaries?
(
Journalism
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
seriously?
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 4:05PM

We’ve seen all sorts of paywall ideas for newspapers, some more ridiculous than others, but this one seems really bizarre. We’ve been waiting for some time to see the details of Stephen Brill’s
paywalls-for-newspapers company
, Journalism Online, and apparently the first “in the wild” test for the system will be with LancasterOnline, the website of a small newspaper in south-central Pennsylvania…
and the paywall will only cover the obituaries section
. Yes, you read that right. You can read seven obits for free, but if you have eight friends who died this month, you’ll have to pay an additional $1.99 per month to keep reading their obits.

Separately, it appears that Journalism Online’s “paywall” system is so weak that even the company itself is
highlighting ways to get around the paywall
(turn off javascript, use noscript, use multiple browsers or delete your cookies), saying basically they don’t think many people will actually bother to do any of those things. Of course, most people also won’t bother to pay, so perhaps we can call it even.

19 Comments

Trademark And Domain Names… Two Very Different Rulings From One Judge
(
Trademark
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
what’s-up-kozinski?
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 2:59PM

If you’re looking for one of the most entertaining judges on the bench today, Alex Kozinski may be your judge. He’s famous for being both clear and entertaining in his rulings, and for pulling such stunts as
nominating himself
for a contest on “Judicial Hotties” with an email to the organizers stating: “While I think the list of female candidates is excellent, the list of male candidates is, frankly, lacking. And what it’s lacking is me.” So I’m always partial to reading opinions by Kozinski, even if I find I disagree with him more often than I would like. Yet, here we have two recent decisions by Kozinski that seem to effectively disagree with each other on an issue dealing with trademark and domain names.

The first, noted by Eric Goldman, involves Kozinski’s determination that
that the domain eVisa.com represents trademark infringement over Visa’s trademark
even though eVisa is not in competition with Visa at all, and is focused on language tutoring. Kozinski says that there is infringement, citing trademark dilution. The whole theory of “dilution” in trademark law is problematic enough already, in that it goes way beyond the purpose of trademark law to act as a method of consumer protection against confusion. When you add in “dilution” then suddenly trademark becomes something very different and allows companies to stifle totally unrelated uses of a domain name. As Goldman notes this ruling seems to suggest that Visa (the company) can block out any use of “visa” in a domain name, even if it is accurately used as the dictionary definition of visa (i.e., to travel to another country):

the word “Visa” already has several dictionary definitions. This poses a problem for the blurring analysis. Visa the trademark can’t co-opt the existing dictionary meanings. So does dilution-by-blurring mean that Visa the trademark can preempt every non-dictionary commercial use of the word? That seems to be a logical implication of this opinion.

And while (as per usual) Kozinski’s ruling is entertaining in its opening:

She sells sea shells by the sea shore. That’s swell, but how
about Shell espresso, Tide motor oil, Apple bicycles and Playboy
computers? We consider the application of anti-dilution
law to trademarks that are also common English words.

it runs into trouble pretty quickly. Historically trademark is only supposed to apply to the areas where you use the mark in commerce. This expansion of dilution changes it into something totally different, and something that seems to run into some serious First Amendment issues.

Yet, just a week later, Kozinski penned another ruling having to do with trademarks and domain names, brought to our attention by Thomas O’Toole’s analysis, where Kozinski seems to
smack down Toyota for trying to claim infringement by the holders of the domain buy-a-lexus.com
. In this ruling, Kozinski makes plenty of sense, and amusingly mocks those who think that there’s some sort of confusion in just a domain name alone:

In the age
of FIOS, cable modems, DSL and T1 lines, reasonable, prudent
and experienced internet consumers are accustomed to
such exploration by trial and error. … They skip from site to site, ready to hit the
back button whenever they’re not satisfied with a site’s contents.
They fully expect to find some sites that aren’t what
they imagine based on a glance at the domain name or search
engine summary…. [Consumers] don’t form any firm expectations about the
sponsorship of a website until they’ve seen the landing page
–if then. This is sensible agnosticism, not consumer confusion. So long as the site as a
whole does not suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the
trademark holder, such momentary uncertainty does not preclude
a finding of nominative fair use.

Of course, the difference here is that he’s using the “consumer confusion” view of trademark law, which makes sense, rather than the dilution by blurring standard, which opens up all sorts of problems. But it really does seem difficult to see how a judge could rule against eVisa one week, and then write the paragraph above the very next week. In fact, while we note that the dilution claims raise serious First Amendment issues, those aren’t mentioned in that ruling. Yet, here in the Toyota ruling, Kozinski quickly points out how ruling in favor of Toyota would raise First Amendment issues:

It is the wholesale prohibition of nominative use in domain
names that would be unfair. It would be unfair to merchants
seeking to communicate the nature of the service or product
offered at their sites. And it would be unfair to consumers,
who would be deprived of an increasingly important means of
receiving such information. As noted, this would have serious
First Amendment implications. The only winners would be
companies like Toyota….

It’s really too bad that the Alex Kozinski, who wrote this later ruling, couldn’t go talk to the Alex Kozinski who wrote the first ruling.

13 Comments

Legal Settlement ‘Paves The Way’ To Release Of Duke Nukem Forever?
(
Surprises
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
i’ll-believe-it-when-i-see-it
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 1:54PM

What, you thought that the fact that just because the developer of the world’s
most famous vaporware
game, Duke Nukem Forever, had
gone out of business
that the game might really never come out? Yeah, well, after the company shut down, there was the little matter of a lawsuit with Take Two over the game.
Michael Scott
points us to the news that Take Two and 3d Realms have now
settled their legal fight over the game
, meaning that this “could pave the way to the release of the game.”

Ah, but there’s a caveat. You see, the game “now reportedly needs to be completed.” Ah, right. Same thing we’ve been hearing for 13 years now. So, I think we can go back to considering the game permanent vaporware.

31 Comments

First Post-Bilski Patent Appeals Ruling Rejects Software Patent
(
Patents
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
nonpatentable-abstractions
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 12:51PM

Well, well, well. Following the rather
ridiculously vague
Bilski ruling, that doesn’t actually say what the right test should be for whether or not business methods or software should be patentable, many people have been wondering what it really means. While some of the justices have
hinted
at the idea that most software really isn’t patentable, that’s not at all clear from the ruling. Instead, the ruling suggests that the courts come up with a new test, and then the Supreme Court will tell them whether or not that new test is okay. Many software patent system supporters have interpreted this to mean that software patents are perfectly okay. But perhaps they shouldn’t go that far just yet.

Groklaw is pointing out that, in the first post-Bilski ruling by the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences (BPAI),
a software patent application from HP has been rejected
, with the BPAI saying that “abstract software code” is not patentable, as per Bilski. We’ve heard that plenty of people at the USPTO aren’t fans of software patents themselves, so if they start ruling that most software is “abstract software code,” things could get pretty interesting, pretty fast.

29 Comments

If Negotiators Still Don’t Want To Release ACTA, It’ll Still Get Leaked
(
Copyright
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
leaky-old-boat
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 11:51AM

So, we now know for certain that the ACTA negotiators’ promise of “transparency” over negotiations was an outright lie. They fought it every step of the way, falsely claiming that if the draft were public, some members would
leave the table
. It was only after a pretty massive
smack down
from the EU Parliament
and
the fact that the draft was
already leaked
that negotiators finally agreed to
release a draft
that
left out
lots of pertinent information.

But what was most interesting is how negotiators have acted since then. First, they pretended that the released draft proved all the complaints about ACTA
were unfounded
, but the details showed something
quite different
, which has even supporters of stronger intellectual property
crying foul
.

And how have negotiators responded? Rather than living up to their promises of transparency, they’ve gone back into secrecy mode. They admitted that the draft release was a
one time deal
, which was made even clearer when the last meetings concluded
without a release of the new draft
— and not even a mention of the fact that they wouldn’t be releasing it.

Of course, this is the internet age, and keeping stuff secret tends to backfire badly. Via
Michael Geist
we’ve learned that
the latest ACTA draft has been leaked once again
. You can read it below:

Clearly, some of the parties involved in the negotiations agree that the drafts should be public, and the more some (we’ve heard it’s mainly the US negotiators) want to keep the document secret, the more ridiculous they look. What’s even more ridiculous, of course, is how the US negotiators keep denying reality. They claim they’re being transparent, when they’re not. They claim that the release answered all questions, when it clearly did not. They claim that the concerns of various groups are unfounded, but have failed to respond to their questions. It’s as if they think that as long as they keep saying stuff, someone somewhere will believe them. That’s not quite how it works.

29 Comments

Financial Columnist Stands By Her Claim That Kids Giving Away Lemonade Are Destroying America
(
Economics
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
it-must-be-stopped
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 10:45AM

We recently wrote about the bizarre, and economically clueless, column by a so-called “financial expert,” Terry Savage, who apparently
accosted some young girls for giving away free lemonade
, saying that they showed what was wrong with America, since they should be selling the lemonade. The irony over the fact that she was giving them “free” advice apparently did not occur to her. Not surprisingly, a lot of people contacted Savage to express their bewilderment at her column, and rather than admit that perhaps she got the story wrong, she’s standing by it.
Phillip
alerts us to her most recent column, where she
tries to explain, yet again, why these girls were destroying America
. It’s not that she’s against charity. Or even that she thinks charity goes against capitalism. It’s that she has decided what’s best for these girls is to learn how to make an honest buck.

Basically, Savage seems to insist that, despite not knowing
anything at all
about these children, their situation, their upbringing or their parents, that it was an absolute mistake not to have them selling the lemonade.

It’s important to start teaching those financial lessons at an early age. These little girls, around age 7 or 8, are already targets of consumer marketing — for everything from toys to videos, from fashion to food. Certainly, it’s also the right time to teach them the value of the money they spend, and how difficult it is to earn it.

It certainly is important to teach kids financial lessons. But that doesn’t mean they can’t give away lemonade as well.

The children weren’t rescuing people from the heat, since it was a temperate day. They were just looking for something to do — and there was no one around to teach them how a lemonade stand should really work.

And that’s the crux of the issue. Savage has decided that she knows how a lemonade stand “should work.” She’s also decided that she knows how to best act as a parent for some young girls she knows nothing about. How does she know that they didn’t earn the money used to set up the lemonade stand? How does she know that the lemonade stand wasn’t a reward for something else they did? She’s just decided to take it upon herself to tell children what they should do without knowing anything about the details of what’s going on? That’s not very convincing.

51 Comments

RIAA Spent $17.6 Million In Lawsuits… To Get $391,000 In Settlements?
(
Legal Issues
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
business-as-usual
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 9:44AM

Last month we discussed the question of whether or not the RIAA’s legal strategy
was a success
or not. An RIAA supporter had claimed that it was clearly a success, since most of the people the RIAA sued chose to settle. We questioned that, pointing out that the bottom line of the major record labels was shrinking fast, and the rate of file sharing was increasing. At the same time, we pointed out that the record labels themselves had admitted that the lawsuits were “a money pit.” Ray Beckermann has done some digging and is pointing out just how big a money pit it really was. In looking through the RIAA’s financial statements, he notes
over $17.6 million spent on big name law firms
who were the key players in the lawsuit campaign. And all those settlements? In 2008, they brought in $391,000. The 2007 numbers were even worse. $21 million in legal fees, plus another $3.5 million for “investigative services” to bring in… $515,929 in settlement fees. 2006? $19 million in legal fees, $3.6 million in investigative services… $455,000 in settlements.

So if we’re doing some quick math, over a three year period, the RIAA spent over $64 million on this lawsuit campaign… which brought in about $1.4 million in settlement money. We’re talking about getting back about 2% of the money spent.

Wow. These lawsuits weren’t just a money pit. They were an economic disaster. And don’t buy the argument that this was the cost of “educating” people not to file share. If that were the case, then file sharing wouldn’t still keep increasing. There’s no way you can look at these numbers and not realize just how disastrous the RIAA’s legal campaign was. And yet the RIAA bosses
are getting raises
? Incredible. It’s been a dozen years since the RIAA had a very real opportunity to
lead
the recording industry into the digital era by adapting and embracing what the technology allowed. Instead, they’ve fought it the whole way, costing millions of dollars, and severely impacting the labels’ bottom lines. Can anyone explain why the labels are still supporting the current RIAA leadership when it appears that every step of the way they’ve made exactly the wrong decisions?

107 Comments

French Politicians Backing Away From Three Strikes As They Realize They Need To Get Re-elected At Some Point
(
Politics
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
political-realities
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 8:42AM

France was the first country to propose a “three strikes” law, pushed through carefully by President Sarkozy (whose wife is a famous singer). What was originally thought to have been a slamdunk proposal for Sarkozy’s ruling party, turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. First, everyone was surprised when France’s National Assembly
rejected
Sarkozy’s plan. However, a month or so later, it was
narrowly approved
. It hit another stumbling block when the French Constitutional Council ruled it
unconstitutional
, but Sarkozy
tweaked it
and got it passed again. It was supposed to go into effect at the beginning of this year, but hit yet another snag when there were concerns over whether or not it violated data privacy laws. Last month,
that hurdle
was finally cleared.

So now there’s nothing standing between Hadopi and kicking people off the internet, right? In fact, reports suggested the Hadopia agency (which, amusingly was caught using an
infringing font
for its logo — strike one!) was ready to start sending out 50,000 notices a day.

But wait… As a bunch of you are sending in, apparently a bunch of members of Sarkozy’s party are now
rethinking their support of Hadopi
, noting that the plan might not be very effective, and they are worrying that it may harm just casual file sharers. In fact, a leading member of the party, Jean-Francois Cope admits he’s “evolved” on the issue, and notes that the law has a “clumsy choice” in terms of the wording.

Reading between the lines a bit here, it appears that these politicians have been hearing from upset constituents about Hadopi, and are starting to realize that they’re going to need to get re-elected at some point. That’s the kind of thing that can “evolve” your thinking on concepts like kicking your constituents off the internet, because they wanted to hear some music.

42 Comments

eBay Sued For Patent Infringement… With Added Conspiracy Theory
(
Patents
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
don’t-miss-it
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 7:39AM

Another day, another patent lawsuit against a big company for doing something obvious, filed by a company that appears to exist solely for the purpose of suing a company that actually does stuff. This time it’s a “company” XPRT Ventures who has
sued eBay and is demanding a mere $3.8 billion for its troubles
. $3.8 billion dollars for doing nothing seems like a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, the news coverage seems lacking. It doesn’t say what patents the lawsuit involves or what those patents cover, so we had to do some digging ourselves. The law firm that filed lawsuit issued a
rather one-sided press release
that also alleges that eBay “unilaterally altered” a confidentiality agreement between XPRT and eBay — which makes the case a bit more interesting. The press release still doesn’t name the patents, but it does link to the ridiculously long (209 pages)
complaint
(warning: ridiculously large pdf), which you can also read below:

From here we find out that the “inventors” (and I use the term loosely) came up with some rather basic enhancements for online payments, and apparently pitched them to eBay way back in 2001. A law firm claiming to represent eBay apparently asked to see the patent applications, and that was about the end of the discussions. XPRT, however, claims that eBay then took those ideas and decided to buy PayPal to implement them. That eBay bought Paypal because most people on eBay were using PayPal to complete transactions and eBay wanted a cut of those transactions isn’t mentioned. Instead, the complaint suggests that eBay bought PayPal specifically to try to replicate what was in XPRT’s patent applications:

Upon information and belief, eBay’s familiarity with the confidential information provided by the Inventors allowed eBay to recognize the advantages it would realize by acquiring, modifying and integrating PayPal’s payment platform with eBay’s own e-commerce payment platform. eBay also knew or should have known that such modification and combination would violate Inventors’ patent applications claims should they issue as patents.

Yeah, ok. This gets even more ridiculous when you realize that XPRT is claiming that it was modifications that PayPal/eBay didn’t roll out until 6 or 7 years later that are supposedly infringing.

As for the whole conspiracy stuff about eBay “unilaterally altering” the date on the agreement, it turns out there’s not much there there. Basically, eBay and the inventors negotiated over an NDA to share some information, with the initial proposed NDA having a date of March __, 2002. That was, clearly, a placeholder, found in just about every contact negotiation you’ll ever see. When eBay actually signed the NDA it replaced the placeholder with the date of the signature, April 30, 2003. That’s how contracts work.

XPRT, however, suggests that eBay’s own (equally questionable) patents on its own payment system were filed just before eBay signed this document, and that eBay failed to note the XPRT patent applications, despite knowing about them, as prior art. To make it even more fun, the complaint suggests that eBay effectively admitted that XPRT’s technologies are patentable, because it tried to cover the same inventions with the claims in its own patent filings. Basically, this is a sneaky way to (try to) cut off a claim that XPRT’s patents are invalid.

Anyway, the key patent in the battle is the following, which, while it was filed back in 2001, didn’t actually issue until 2009. If you look through the history of this particular patent, you find a trail of rejection. The USPTO did a non-final rejection, then a final rejection of the patent in 2004 and 2005. The inventors appealed (and twice had problems of filing a “defective appeal brief”). The appeal also rejected the patent and sided with the examiner. The inventors then asked to have the patent reconsidered, and that was rejected. Then, they asked for the patent to be examined again, and, yet again, the USPTO rejected the patent — with both a non-final and final rejection. Finally, after all those rejections, the inventors amended the patent some more and finally got it through in 2009. In other words, whatever they showed eBay way back in 2001 was not actually patentable, and what was patented in 2009 was quite different.

7,483,856
: System and method for effecting payment for an electronic auction commerce commerce transaction

If you look at the other patents, they appear to be continuation patents on that patent, the
common trick
of updating an old patent application to make sure it covers what others are actually doing in the market, even if such things weren’t really what the initial patent was intended to cover.

Oh, and finally, why are these guys demanding $3.8 billion for a basic idea that they failed to implement themselves? Well, they appear to be claiming a 6% royalty on all of PayPal’s revenues, and then make a bunch of assumptions about how much PayPal is likely to make between now and 2024 when the patents will expire. In other words, it’s simply making up how much eBay might make and demanding a rather large cut of that.

17 Comments

Old Spice Man Is Horsing Around On Social Media
(
Culture
)

by
Dennis Yang
from the
i'm-on-a-horse
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 6:17AM

When we last saw the Old Spice man, he was
on a horse
, and demonstrated how a brilliantly clever ad could attract its own viewers, instead of trying to divert attention with an annoying or distracting ad. In the five months since the ad first aired, the ad has collected nearly 13 million views on YouTube and was also
awarded
the Grand Prix for film at this year’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

The Old Spice man is back, and once again,
showing that he truly gets how to engage with his audience
. Starting Monday, he began posting video responses to various Twitter, Facebook, and other social media commentary, oftentimes resulting in hilarity. Most of the over one hundred responses have been posted within a few hours of a tweet or comment, which is a blistering pace for an ad campaign with a traditional CPG company. My favorites are his response to
Alyssa Milano
and the one where Twitter user jsbeals asks Old Spice man to
propose
to his girlfriend for him:

Ad agency Wieden + Kennedy hit it out of the park again with this ad — they were able to craft an infectiously viral ad campaign, while at the same time incorporating the brand as a key part of the message. After all, he’s not “I’m on a horse” man, he’s the Old Spice man. That said, while such a campaign may definitely drive awareness, awareness may not necessarily result in sales: according to SymphonyIRI, sales of Old Spice Red Zone (the product featured in the ad) actually
dropped
7 percent.

Then again, surely jsbeals will be buying a few cases of Red Zone in appreciation of the help from Old Spice man (his girlfriend accepted the proposal).

32 Comments

Man Fined $400 For Impersonating A Moron
(
Stupidity
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
no,-seriously
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 4:45AM

Okay, here’s a quick one that I’m posting because it’s amusing. Apparently a guy in Canada has been
fined $400 for telling the cops his name was Andrew Moron
after he was caught drinking beer at a beach. What’s illegal about that? Well there’s a ban on alcohol at the location and, the guy’s name is actually Alan Henry, and so the police charged him with “impersonation to avoid arrest.” So, basically, he was charged with impersonating a moron. Of course, one might argue that it’s not impersonation if it’s true…

29 Comments

Newspaper Publisher Sues Guy For Posting Article Based On Research He Gave The Paper For Free
(
Copyright
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
going-a-bit-far?
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 3:10AM

Earlier this year, we wrote about the company Righthaven, which has some sort of connection to the Las Vegas Journal Review (or, at least, its lawyer), who is now going around
suing lots of sites
for reposting LVJR content. What was interesting about the lawsuits is that Righthaven never sent any cease-and-desists or DMCA takedowns or anything. It just went straight to suing. That’s allowed… but odd. On top of that, many of the repostings weren’t competitors or sites that were trying to take business away from the LVJR. In fact, in many cases, it involved organizations mentioned in the LVJR who were trying to
promote
the LVJR.

Apparently, Righthaven and LVJR continue to file these kinds of lawsuits, and they just keep getting more ridiculous.
Michael Scott
points us to to the fact that Righthaven has
sued a guy named Anthony Curtis
, who reposted an article from the LVJR that talked about research Curtis had done on ticket prices for entertainment shows in Vegas.

If you’re playing along at home, the LVJR published an article based on research — which it got for free — from Curtis, and when he then tries to highlight that article, the LVJR sues him. As the MediaPost story notes, the LVJR article about Curtis’ research even notes that his annual survey is a “thankless task.” Thankless, indeed.

21 Comments

Author Puts Novel Online For Free… And Gets A Book Deal
(
Free
)

by
Mike Masnick
from the
but-free-never-works
dept on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 @ 12:23AM

alex was the first of a few of you to send over the story of how author Marta Acosta posted her “young adult vampire novel” online for free
at Scribd
, where it became a top download with tons of great reviews… and that
helped her get a book deal
with Tor, who will be publishing the book in hardcover shortly. Once again, another example of how “obscurity” is a bigger problem than “piracy” for most content creators.

36 Comments

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