Author Drops Copyright Case Against Scribd Filter 81
natehoy writes "Apparently, monitoring for copyright violations is not in itself a copyright violation, lawyers for Elaine Scott decided. As a result, they have dropped the lawsuit against Scribd, who was being simultaneously sued for allowing copies of Scott's work to be published, and retaining an unlicensed copy of the work in their filtering software to try and prevent future copyright violations."
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is getting really frickin ridiculous.
They are being sued for not blocking copyrighted data, and then sued for holding a copy in their filter so that they can block further copies? WTF?
What do you even say to that kind of idiot?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you even say to that kind of idiot?
"Case dismissed."
New Strategy... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's a new strategy for pirates.
"I'm not pirating software! I'm watching out for copyright infringement, and I need a copy in of the pirated product in order to do just that!"
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if it is getting ridiculous as much as the law itself is just confusing and unclear. It requires court arbitration to figure out the simplest of questions. "Is ripping CDs for a backup 'fair use'?", etc. Unfortunately, law is worse than code in terms of legacy support. Think of this as the ultimate code bloat legacy application. All you want to do is gut the whole thing and start over, but management will not entertain that motion at all.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
The law SERIOUSLY needs to be gutted. I think the common law system is fatally flawed in this way. There's no way for a reasonably informed and intelligent citizen to be able to scratch the surface of the thousands of laws, decisions, precedents which could be brought to bear on him at any moment. How can that possibly be fair?
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
>What do you even say to that kind of idiot?
"I'm sorry, from now on I'll use a hash instead"?
Re:Seriously? (Score:1, Insightful)
What do the respective lawyers say to their clients?
Thanks. We'll invoice you.
Re:Seriously? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's the point...
Re:A real shame. That was a brilliant business mod (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that your #1 is not the facts of the case.
The site was using an unauthorized copy of the work to check for other unauthorized copies.
Stealing a car to look for stolen cars doesn't make you a cop.
Re:What about Child Porn? (Score:1, Insightful)
Could I propose an extension to Godwin's Law? Or maybe a modernization of it? "As any legal or political discussion progresses, the probability that someone will bring up child porn approaches one", complete with the "and the person who brought it up loses the argument" clause? Seriously, is that all anyone thinks about anymore?
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just yesterday I saw a copy of the full criminal code, in all its fine print 700 page glory. I don't know how anyone can possibly say with a straight face that "ignorance is not an excuse".