Domain Registering and Hosting/Website Funny Business

[Steven]

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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