Archangel_Gabriel opened this issue on Oct 24, 2004 ยท 18 posts
servo posted Tue, 26 October 2004 at 10:04 AM
Is Drudge really the standard? Gee, the New York Times and CBS News will be awfully relieved to hear that. It'll take some of the heat off of their having to fire people for making up stories and doing biased TV segment political hitjobs based on unchecked falsified documents. You may have found a way to save Dan Rather's flagging career! (No liberal vs. conservative hatemail, please -- this is just some friendly inside-joke teasing between me and rowan_crisp, acknowledging our extremely laughably opposite views.) Regarding the Superman image, I only point out again that the main issue is that Daniel's artwork is based on an actor who likeness he doesn't own, and a character icon of whom the copyrights he also does not own. He did do a very nice ancillary derivative work, to which he owns some limited rights (to at least acknowledgement) for his artistic effort, but legally, suing anyone over its use (especially on a news oriented site) would be a tremendously uphill battle. That's all I was saying -- not defending Drudge or anyone else per se. This is especially true without Daniel having watermarked or signed the image to place his own limited copyright claim on the picture and his placing it publically on the internet. The press uses short movie images, stock stills, and short cound clips from copyrighted works all the time under the 1st Amendment wording that specifically allows for limited reproduction for the purposes of parody, education, and news-related works. Reeve's death is a headline event, & that makes all images of him more-or-less fair game for the press under these auspices. Yes, they should have tracked down and acknowledged the image source. But if each of us had a nickel for every time all the major news organizations failed to provide the source of an internet photo post, we could stack them to Mars. If you still wanna sue, hey, go for it. It seems sadly to be the american way these days, and it'll probably make a lot of lawyers on all sides very happy. Again, in closing -- please no flame wars -- I'm just commenting here for point-counterpoint purposes and not trying to assault anyone here personally. I think Daniel's image is great, and I think he should definitely have gotten credit for it, and it's sad that he did not. I just think making a big deal over it would just make for richer trial lawyers, which both the left and the right should mutually work against in our hyper-litigious society --- IMHO. We could feed the world with money saved by people being nice to each other and settling things out of court instead of clogging the justice system with "you did me dirty so let's wager our life savings on a legal wrestling match" type lawsuits. Play nice--Peace. (And by the way, I think Ann Coulter's very attractive... it's not logical to cast aspersions on people's looks because you hate their politics... Although I'm man enough to admit I'm guilty of hypocrisy somewhat in this area since I think Al Franken is the freakiest looking guy in the universe --except for Carrot Top, naturally.)