[Foundation-l] copyright issues

[Robin McCain]

On 8/17/2011 9:20 AM, Wjhonson wrote:
> For plagiarism to "cause injury" you have to specify the type of 
> injury in your suit.
> And then the case is not about laws about plagiarism per se, of which 
> there are none, but laws about the type of injury you are claiming.
> For example unfair trade as in "I made all these designs and posted 
> them to my website, company X stole my work by creating the actual 
> products without the need to do any design work".  That sort of 
> thing.  But that's not a law about plagiarism.
Wow! you opened a can of worms...  I'm sure at least one of my lawyer 
friends who specialize in intellectual property could respond in great 
detail about this.

According to the Berne Convention authors have moral rights as well as 
legal rights.

We aren't talking about student work here, but the real world where a 
lot of money at stake. It doesn't even matter if the issue is laughed 
out of court - you have still spent many thousands of dollars just 
getting to that day. (this is why companies often settle rather than go 
to court)

I can assure you that no reputable publisher or distributor would 
knowingly accept work that has been extensively plagiarized on the basis 
that there is potential for a lawsuit of some sort unless they had deep 
pockets and were knowingly doing this as a marketing strategy.

All I'm trying to say here is that plagiarism often accompanies 
copyright infringement, and that there can be a very fine line between 
the two. In real world terms - you don't want to go there.