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Harlan Ellison vs. AOL Judgment Reversed
Robotech_Master writes "An appeals court has issued a decision reversing the summary judgment of a lower court that AOL qualified as a "safe harbor" under the DMCA. At issue is the fact that Ellison sent his notification of copyright violation to an email address at AOL, which AOL never received because the abuse submission address had been changed." The complete decision is available here as a PDF file; read below for an excerpt.
"AOL changed its contact e-mail address from "copyright@aol.com" to "aolcopyright@aol.com" in the fall of 1999, but waited until April 2000 to register the change with the U.S. Copyright Office. Moreover, AOL failed to configure the old e-mail address so that it would either forward messages to the new address or return new messages to their senders. In the meantime, complaints such as Ellison's went unheeded, and complainants were not notified that their messages had not been delivered. Furthermore, there is evidence in the record suggesting that a phone call from AOL subscriber John J. Miller to AOL should have put AOL on notice of the infringing activity on the particular USENET group at issue in this case, "alt.binaries.e-book." Miller contacted AOL to report the existence of unauthorized copies of works by various authors. Because there is evidence indicating that AOL changed its e-mail address in an unreasonable manner and that AOL should have been on notice of infringing activity we conclude that a reasonable trier of fact could find that AOL had reason to know of potentially infringing activity occurring within its USENET network."
Slashlaw: The Finest in IANAL Speculation
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
I would use that high-speed technology to send The American Choppers kid (you know the geeky one) back in time to kill Harlan Ellison. But in an ironic twist he will fall in love with him and instead be forced to let him die in a freak truck accident.
Why doesn't AOL just settle with Ellison, maybe offer him like 5,000 free hours instead of the normal 2,500?
Do you think AOL is an ISP?
Get real!
They are a CD-Company, always sending out these so called AOL-CDs.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Dammit Harlan, if you quit SHOUTING at us, we might actually listen!
I see the problem: His original email to AOL was probably ALLCAPS, so their spam-filter ate it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Love you Harley.
I'm not familiar with this author. Can somebody tell me where I can download some of his works?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It's a conspiracy I tell you! A CONSPIRACY!
I heard that Ellison's original script had some low-level Enterprise crew doing drugs which leads to this time-travel incident, but the Hollywood suits took that out because the Enterprise crew are all Eagle Scouts and that would never happen in the Star Trek universe, so they rewrote the script to have McCoy accidently inject himself with a dangerous (legit) medication when the Enterprise hits a space-time "air pocket" (you know, one of those things that tosses everyone out of the seats that they are not belted into).
If you write scripts for Hollywood, having someone else do a rewrite for any of a number of pandering reasons is part of the landscape, and as far as making the Enterprise crew Boy Scouts who would never use drugs, whoever is supervising a series has to keep the episodes consistent with a vision or else it turns into Superman Comics where Superman keeps getting more powers in each episode that they have to hit some kind of reset button.
Getting back on topic, Ellison may not be a nut case, but he has a track record of pissing into the wind on matters of principle that turn out to be no-win situations.
Or Harlan Ellison... er... the aging bloated fraud whose presence annoys intelligent tech savvy people, and who will savagely destroy anyone who he percieves as a threat to his ability perpetuate a tired business model...
Oh well... never mind...
Posting anonymously so Harlan won't be able to find me and kill me for DARING say anything against the great man.