Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
I'm not sure I would call it naive, but to just assert that the courts treat everyone equally... I almost find it kind of offensive. There are many people who have been disenfranchised by the courts. To claim that the courts do, not should, but do, treat everyone equally is to pretend that those people and their situations do not exist.
I find that very upsetting, from a perspective of both feminism and civil rights, and oh... several others, too. And I don't think it should be presented as an opinion -- it's a factual statement that is either true or false, and I would say that this particular statement is demonstrably false.
|
While its true that the big guys can better enforce their IP rights by hiring teams of lawyers to pursue pirates across state lines and to file one DMCA notice after another, I'm not sure how that helps your point. The poor shlub who can't afford all that high priced legal help just has to take his lumps, even to the extent of going out of business .
An example is the Art4LOve case, detailed
HERE
This was a massive, clear- cut case of copyright infringement and plagiarism involving artwork posted online. Most of the artists will never recover , because:
Quote:
It gets tricky because of a feature of US copyright law – while one’s work is ostensibly protected by copyright law from the moment it is fixed in a tangible form (Article 5.2 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works sets that copyright protection will not be subject to any formality), in order to pursue an infringement claim in the US most effectively, one must have registered the work with the Copyright Office prior to infringement. Not only does this provide prima-facie evidence of authorship in certain circumstances (mostly to do with when the work was registered relative to publication date), but also enables the author-plaintiff to sue for statutory damages and attorney’s fees. The work must be registered prior to filing a federal suit in any case (a more detailed discussion of these issues can be found in this post from ArtBusiness.com).
It is more than likely that many, if not most, of the artists involved had not registered their works with the USCO – especially since many of them are probably not US residents. While this does not make it impossible to pursue the matter, it does make it a lot harder and more expensive (since lawyers will probably be reluctant to take the case without a large up-front payment). From my lofty European perch, I cannot help but wonder whether the automatic protection afforded under Berne isn’t mostly theoretical in the US (then again, this seems to be true of a lot of US copyright law, witness the DMCA).
|
In short, the reasons pirates get away with their @$$holerey is because a lawless, un-policed Internet makes it very costly to enforce IP rights . Fortunately, it looks like the rule of law is gradually coming to more and more of the Internet