Phil -
Your contribution to this hobby is well above and beyond the call of duty. Your web pages are informative, enlightening, entertaining, and motivational. Your writing style is elegant and to-the-point. Your ability to explain complex concepts in easy terms is, well, Asimovian. Nobody doubts that "you 'da man" when it comes to your website. I personally thank you for providing the service, as others here at AK have thanked you (and I'm sure many more readers out there do too). Excelent work and Kudos.
The law is the law, however.
95% of the laws in this country are there for a reason, and for the most part they are good reasons. And if you disagree with a law there's a process in place to change it involving lawyers and judges and appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. Copyright laws have been argued up the food chain ad nauseum and they're pretty well cast in stone at this point. You could try to argue this case if you wanted to, but you wouldn't get very far. There is a gray area but the eBay seller was nowhere near it.
Current US Copyright law contains a doctrine called "fair use". Contrary to your statements (and others) in this post, it is, in fact,
not illegal to copy somebody else's copyrighted work. Not if it fits within the "fair use" clauses established in title 17 (chapter 107) of US the copyright code. The 4 clauses are outlined here:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
The first clause might seem to be in your favor, as the guy posted your copyrighted words on eBay, but it doesn't matter that he happened to be engaging in commerce when he cited your words -- the
actual use must have been commercial in nature -- i.e. he must have been selling or buying (or trading in)
your words to violate this clause. He was selling a TV set. If he was selling a pamphlet about facts on a Pilot TV-37 and stole your words to put in the pamphlet, you might have had a case. As it is, he was using your words in an educational manner to inform his potential customers about the details of his TV. This is fair use. Any lawywer would argue thus, and any judge would decide in his favor.
Clause 2 of the code refers to the nature of your work and essentially boils down to whether your copyrighted work is fiction, fact, or art. If the person using your work provides another outlet for viewers of your artwork, he probably violates this clause. Say, if he put a highly-detailed scan of the Mona Lisa on his eBay ad and said his TV was as pretty as a DaVinci, he might have violated clause 2 --
if his posting of the scan caused some people not to go to the Louvre to see the real thing.
If he uses your fiction, a lot less likely so -- say if he had excerpted his favorite passage of Moby Dick and said the TV makes him feel like sailing. Maybe a violation, maybe not.
If he uses your description of facts, most of the time a judge says "no". Facts is facts and repeating them usually isn't harmful to society.
Clause 3 deals with how much of your work is taken. Since he excerpted a few paragraphs from one page of your body of dozens or hundreds of pages, his intent was pretty clearly not to steal your work but to repeat a specific, small portion of it. His theft wasn't gross.
Clause 4 is usually the most important clause -- i.e. can you show "damages"? His intent clearly wasn't to steer viewers away from your work -- to devalue your work by competing with it. In fact (as was suggested by other posters to this thread) he very likely increased your audience by referring to your work (although he had no obligation to do so, because
not doing so did not cause you to lose any audience members). So he in no way damaged your website's ability to accomplish its mission. You can't show any tangible damages. So no violation of clause 4.
The guy did nothing wrong. Absolutely not.
Did he engage in bad manners? Maybe so. But that's not illegal. The amount of bad manners displayed here on this thread? -- a lot!
"Innocent dolt"
"Feckin' guy's too lazy"
"Plagiarizing"
"this guy brought it back into borderline"
"people ripping off articles"
"Someone's in need of a serious beatdown"
"replace the Pilot TV page with porno"
"hey asshole, stop linking"
"well-meaning nitwit"
Well, the eBay seller doesn't have a monopoly on bad manners.
As far as:
Quote:
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It's not good enough for him to say he "gathered" information online. That's like me saying, "Please buy this novel entitled Jurassic Park by Phil Nelson. I gathered it by photocopying the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton."
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again, he wasn't selling your website, he was selling a TV, so the analogy fails.
And as far as:
Quote:
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Copyright infringement is a matter of degree
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well, no, copyright infringement is very clearly black and white. It's Title 17, chapter 1 of US code. Rules are rules.
Lastly, please correct me if I'm wrong. Is the artwork in your avatar your own personal work? Or did you copy it? The eBay seller frankly did less if it is not. And I notice, even on your web page in question, you link to an RCA manual without citing the reference. Glass houses and throwing stones and all that.
It's ok, though. Avatars fall within "fair use". So does linking to an RCA manual to increase the value of your own work.
That's my rant for the day. On a much lighter note, I did buy the TV set. Mostly I just wanted to see the poor guy get a good price after the beating he took here, but I ended up winning too. Fair enough, I've been meaning to get a TV-37 for a long time anyway, and this one looks pretty intact (barring UPS manhandling in the next few days). I passed on one at the annual Lansing Antique Radio Swapmeet last summer and have been kicking myself since. This one will end up being only a few dollars more expensive, and now it has all kinds of cool sentimental value to me because of the "Phil Nelson Controversy". It should be a fun rebuild.
Hope this post was informative. I'm not into flame wars. Just saying my piece.
Cheers.
