Can Copyright Apply to SPAM?

Richard W.M. Jones asks: "The Great Spam Archive received a legal threat today. A 'lawyer' claims that some spam displayed at the site is copyright, and must be removed. I'm claiming it's fair use for me to display an unwanted email sent to thousands (probably millions) of people at random. Is this fair use, or do they really have a case?"

Comments

Hello?

[I Am The Owl]

Is this fair use, or do they really have a case?

Well, I don't know, MAYBE YOU SHOULD ASK A LAWYER. Sheesh, when will people learn?

You need the handy dandy "Fair Use" converter.

[TrebleJunkie]

You need the handy dandy "Fair Use" conversion algorithm.

The algorithm is open source, and it works like this:

1. Split the entire spam into paragraphs.
2. Display 2 paragraphs.
3. Credit the original author appropriately.
4. Add one sentence of critique, preferably in italics. And call them cocksuckers as many times as you can without becoming tedious.
5. Repeat steps 2 - 5 until you run out of paragraphs.

Cheers!

Re:Yes. It can.

[disappear]

Although they can't copyright the subject line trick of using all upper case.

No, but they could patent that: "A technique for indicating the relative value of Internet e-mail through subject line modification."

Re:unfortunately...

[Kibo]

Bah. Everytime someone asks a legal question of the slashdot community some smart alec goes as says, "Get a lawyer, Duh!" How's that help him. What's a lawyer going to do for him that a lot of wild assed guessing can't do? Save his house? Prevent his children from being sold into slavery? Maybe, but that's totally beside the point!

I say, tell the representative of said company, that you didn't copy anything. You just saved the original, because you were intruiged by their offer of a larger penis, and later wrote a web page around it when you found out their offer was less than genuine. So you didn't make any sort of copy, you're just letting people see your original.

What's slashdot comming to when a request for a delusional ranting ends up soliciting sensible legal advice? It's at times like this that I weep for the script kiddies.

Re:Magazines...

[misterhaan]

I could walk around with a tee shirt on that said "By talking to me you agree to pay me $100" on it and make a fortune.

if you are like most slashdot readers you'd probably be lucky to make $20 on something that actually depends on people talking to you. and that $20 would probably be from your mom.

I wish I had gotten it...

[KjetilK]

Well, I'm in Norway, and it would have quite fun to have gotten something like this. We have pretty strong laws against spam, but usually, the difficulty is figuring out who really sent it. So I could respond:

"Thank you for taking responsibility of this abuse. If you ever come under Norwegian jurisdiction, you will face heavy fines and up to six years in prison."