Plagiarizing a Takedown Notice

ChipMonk writes "Over at hobbyist site OS News, editor-in-chief Thom Holwerda published a highly skeptical opinion of the announcement of Commodore USA's own Amiga line. Within hours, Commodore USA sent a takedown notice to OS News, demanding a retraction of the piece and accusing the site of libel and defamation. What's funny is that the takedown notice was mostly copied, with minor edits, from Chilling Effects, a site dedicated to publicizing attempts at squelching free speech. The formatting, line breaks, obtuse references to 'OCGA,' and even the highlighted search terms were left largely intact."

Comments

boilerplate

[Anonymous Coward]

Can boilerplate language be "plagiarized"?

Re:boilerplate

[rolfwind]

I suppose it can. There are legal companies that sell boilerplate contracts online like for a landlord/tenant, so people can print them out and use them for a fee. I don't suppose if another company sprang up and used their templates, those companies would be too happy. If the original companies wrote the templates themselves, I can't imagine why they wouldn't have a case.

IANAL though.

So, why not?

[pedantic bore]

I would guess that most takedown notices look pretty much alike.

Might as well save the money that a lawyer would charge to cut and paste this document... because you're probably going to pay that money to your lawyer for something else.

Re:So, why not?

[unixan]

Might as well save the money that a lawyer would charge to cut and paste this document.

On the flip side:

A. This is results in very asymmetric lawyer costs. The recipient is going to have to spend lawyer time to defend against it that the sender didn't just to send it.

B. By not spending time on a decent lawyer to ensure the takedown is unique and covers the case law for their own jurisdiction, Commodore may have unwittingly given up any legitimate rights they might have had in this dispute.

C. Lawyers are truly valuable at convincing clients to not start legal disputes. By not vetting this by a lawyer, they may started a snowball of subsequent legal costs that could've been avoided entirely if/when they lose. A neat trick used by some defendants, when they're sure to recover most of their defense costs in the end, is to drag out the legal dispute just to teach the other side a lesson.

Re:Not a big deal

[mounthood]

Its not a DMCA, and saying "It's perfectly normal" doesn't make it legal. Who owns the copyright on the text which was copied?

sounds pretty libelous to me

[SuperBanana]

From the article:

Unless proven otherwise, I'm assuming for now that Commodore USA is, at best, a hoax, and at worst, a very inept con.

If you're going to claim someone's business is somewhere between a hoax and a con, you'd better have something better than supposition based off a legal settlement and your subjective opinion of the company's website.

It's called libel, and it's not free speech- and the author seems to be assuming they're guilty until proven innocent. He's got no right to complain about being treated the same way.

Re:Not a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

This is more on the "we don't care about anyone's right to be copied but ours" area of legal that can get them slapped by a judge, hopefully.

Except their complaint has absolutely nothing to do with copyright. Theirs is one of libel and defamation.

The fact that nearly everyone around here instantly assumes that any legal action has to do with copyright says a lot about the level of critical thinking that goes on here.

Re:It Shouldn't Be

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright violations and plagiarism are not the same thing. One has a narrow (or not so narrow) legal definition while the other is a common word indicating an generally unethical copying of work and presenting it as one's own. So IMO yes it can be plagiarized even if it isn't a legal issue.

Re:Freedom of the Press

[Swanktastic]

The "powers that be" in this particular case is some guy in Florida who buys China Ubuntu boxes, slaps a Commodore sticker on them and sells them as Commodore machines. It's not some Fortune 100 company, it's a dude who runs the business out of his furniture warehouse. He hasn't even filed a suit or hired a lawyer, so it's the internet equivalent of "Take that back." I don't think this particular incident is terribly good proof that "He who has the gold makes the rules."

I mean, right now I could paste some legal jargon into this post demanding that you admit your statement was injurious to me, and it wouldn't really indicate anything at all about our legal system.

Re:It Shouldn't Be

[mysidia]

What criteria makes you think it is not a copyrightable work?

The person who makes boilerplate text has created:

• An original work, if no one else had written that particular boiler plate text before
• They authored it
• The boiler plate is literary in nature, being as it is comprised of words, numbers, or verbal/numerical symbols, and it is non-dramatic, being that it is not a work that is performed.
• The boiler plate is fixed it into a tangible form (ASCII coded text stored on a computer disk)

The person who customizes boilerplate to send a letter has simply changed some blanks in the text, to personalize it, creating a new letter that is a derivative of the boilerplate text

Re:Stolen Picture Too?

[StarWreck]

dang, 1999? I suddenly feel so old.

Re:Freedom of the Press

[ibsteve2u]

On the other hand, your taking the action of pasting "some legal jargon into this post" might be a seen as an indicator that the U.S. legal system has become so seriously flawed that those who wish to abuse it feel no compunction against doing so, while those who take the pasted "legal jargon" seriously may be doing so because they are only too aware that the U.S. legal system has indeed been weaponized.