Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

Oh, this is going to be awesome.

Sharron Angle is running against Harry Reid (the Senate majority leader) this November. During the primary, she ran as a hard-line ultra-conservative, playing to the Tea Party. Once that ended, she took down her web site and replaced it with one suggesting that she's a moderate.

Reid decided to put up a copy of her old web site, on the theory that such data should be preserved and publicly available.

Now Angle is suggesting that she wants to sue Reid for copyright violation.

Yes, definitely. Suing someone to make them stop repeating what you said in the middle of a highly-publicized election is an excellent strategy for burying the story. Please, go ahead and do this. I will make popcorn.
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  • 8 comments

bostorus

July 7 2010, 18:47:01 UTC 5 years ago

She's going to get her head handed to her. This is pretty much exactly why there is a Fair Use doctrine.

gkr

July 7 2010, 18:57:18 UTC 5 years ago

Yup. Political speech gets the highest amount of protection.

zunger

July 7 2010, 18:58:58 UTC 5 years ago

From a purely legal perspective, there are some interesting questions here, since Reid's campaign didn't excerpt, but rather reposted the site in its entirety. I'm not sure how this will play with the case law on fair use.

OTOH, from a political perspective, even if Reid loses on every count in court, he wins. The free advertising implicit in a case like this would be worth a lot more than even the maximum statutory damages.

bostorus

July 7 2010, 19:04:56 UTC 5 years ago

Laws on fair use don't prohibit the use of the entire work. Using the whole work makes the usage a little harder to defend in court, but because the usage is most certainly commentary / criticism, I think it will be pretty defensible.

Of course, I'm no lawyer, as you know.

merovingian

July 7 2010, 19:32:39 UTC 5 years ago

"Yep, Angle campaign, you win the case. Here's your $100,000 in damages, which is about what we paid for a single ad. We can pay you in chickens if you prefer. Love, newly re-elected Senator Harry Reid."

merovingian

July 7 2010, 19:35:26 UTC 5 years ago

(Oops, wait, misjoked there. The whole paying in chickens thing was Lowden, not Angle.)