Also not a lawyer, but having done a bit of copyright law review when I
was more active with a camera and when I started taking guitar lessons
and wondered what the legal risks would be to putting myself on youtube
playing songs still under copyright: The first very big question is did
the friend register a copyright. They automatically have a copyright the
moment they put a creative work into tangible form but the way the
courts will go (in the US) is drastically different between unregistered
and registered copyrights. Unregistered you can basically get a court
order to stop violating the copyright and require any ill gotten gains
to be handed over (so, from the photography perspective if someone took
a photo I took and started selling T-shirts with the photo the court
would say, "Stop making those shirts, destroy or hand over any stock of
the shirts you have, and hand over whatever money you gained from
selling them."). On the other hand with a registered copyright you can
demand everything you could get with an unregistered copyright plus up
to $250K per violation (in the shirt example, if they took a photo of my
old family cat an did a run of one hundred shirts with the photo on it,
that's not one violation but a hundred, each shirt would be a separate
violation or up to $25,000,000 over and above whatever they'd made off
the shirts).
The video I saw with an intellectual property lawyer discussion
copyright for photographers said that in his career he never had to take
to court anyone who had the services of an intellectual property lawyer.
They'd send a letter saying, "Hey, you violated my clients *registered*
copyright. If you refuse to settle out of court we will sue. We are
making a one-time settlement offer of only $_____.__ if you cease the
violation as well as handing over or verifiably destroying all
infringing works." It which point the other guy's lawyer would explain
that if it went to court the potential fine could be well beyond their
bank account balance or even what would be raised if everything had to
be auctioned off in a bankruptcy.
Given the hassle of registering a copyright my suspicion is that any
copyrights here would be unregistered. Given that the second question
would be how much hassle your friend is willing to go through and
depending on that either walk away or figure out what they can
realistically hope to recover. The only advice I'll give for the second
option is that if they aren't going to walk away then the don't want to
talk to *a* lawyer, they want to talk to an intellectual property
lawyer. Trying to have cousin Frank who helps people with wills/fight
red-light-camera tickets/or anything else that isn't IP law give advice
on an IP case is effectively the same as walking out on the street and
asking random strangers for advice. Someone who knows current IP law
could advise whether they're likely to only end up burning money for
nothing, actually have a case that would be worth taking or threatening
to take to court, of there's enough there that they might send a letter
saying, "Hey, this was naughty but you don't want to waste time and
money in court any more than we do, so how about we agree to a
settlement on these terms..."
Actually it occurs to me that there is a third question. Is the business
name shown on the web page the same business name that your friend was
using? And if so did they register a trademark on that name? Because
trademarks operate on separate rules from copyright (for example, fair
use only comes into play in regard to copyright not trademark) and if
they swept in while your friend was in the hospital to grab the domain
name and then operated under the same name... Well avoiding confusion
about who you are doing business with is basically the whole entire
point of trademarks. If you spend money on a System 76 laptop you want
to know you're getting a laptop from the actual System 76 and not an
overstock netbook that someone slapped a sticker with the System 76 logo
on. If they registered a trademark then that would be something else to
take to an IP lawyer.
On 7/23/22 19:03, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> On Sat, 2022-07-23 at 07:12 -0700, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>>
>>
>> The thing I am really wondering about is how this dude was able to
>> transfer my friends website and content from my friend's hosting to his
>> hosting. This has to be a copyright violation. What say you?
> I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure it's a copyright violation. If your friend has
> a registered copyright on the site's contents, I'm pretty sure he can sue for $10K,
> no questions asked. If it's not registered, it might not be worth it to sue.
>
> Like I say, I'm not a lawyer, so consult one before making a move.
>
> By the way, every once in a while some birdbrain wget's whole subsites of
> Troubleshooters.Com and hosts it. When I find those, I email them telling them
> they'd better take it down immediately.
>
> SteveT
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