Vince, I believe Terry and other people are right, that forcing them
to remove your FAQ is actually your goal. Educating them so they do not
make the same mistake again could be another, but that is another story.
If they now removed the FAQ, basically we have achieved our goals.
If you are a student, in most cases you do not have the money and effort
to file a real lawsuit to penalize them, not to mention this is a
lawsuit across the US-Canada border. If I were you, I might push for the
lawsuit *IF* I am at least 80% confident that I can win *AND* I am sure
the monetary penalty of theirs can cover my legal fees. Otherwise, I might
not appeal to the legal actions. Of course, being someone from Asia
(actually Taiwan), filing lawsuits seem to be the No. 1 thing for me to
avoid.
For me, I believe it is a good idea to keep pushing them in the court
if you want to set up a precedent so we the other FAQ maintainers can
refer to your case when one day in the future we encounter similar problems,
or your FAQ is plagiarized again and again by different people and you
want to penalize someone to warn the others.
Just my 1 yen ( US$1.00 is around 125 yens for Japan, I guess :) )
===============================
Forwarded message:
> Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 10:06:57 -0700 (PDT)
> Message-Id: <Pine.SOL.3.95.970516100244.12867D-100000@shell1.aimnet.com>
> From: Terry Carroll <carroll@tjc.com>
> Subject: Re: copyright story(long)
>
> Based on the long story, I think Vince should:
>
> 1. Crack open a brew;
> 2. Kick back and enjoy his victory;
> 3. Get on with his life.
>
> They've removed his FAQ. There are no monetary damages worth seeking:
> Vince's FAQ is not registered in the US (right?), so if he were to sue, he
> couldn't get anything except his actual damages or the bike shops actual
> profits from the infringement, which are nil.
>
> Yeah, they're cracked about what copyright covers (the "copyright doesn't
> cover facts" is a first line of defense by lawyers trying to dissuage
> naive copyright owners, and their ideas about notice and registration are
> completely out of line), but so what? They've removed the FAQ, and that's
> the best you can hope for.
Tung-chiang Yang tcyang@netcom.com