Law firm has weird ideas about copyrights

Lots of peeps these days have some straaaaange ideas about copyrights and trademarks!

They'll invoke the illegal DMCA to censor competitors' material even though they don't hold a copyright on anything in it, but they don't recognize a newspaper's right to not have a competing paper or powerful individual take its name. (The latter happened in Kentucky to both the Carlisle Mercury and the Mountain Citizen. Believe it or not, a judge actually ordered the Mountain Citizen to stop publishing under its own name when a public official who it had criticized took its name!)

Recently a website that exposes infomercial scams received a threat letter from a right-wing law firm that represents one of the businesses that the site dared to criticize. Not only did the threat letter take issue with what the site said about its client, but it concluded with a baseless threat that warned the site not to print the letter. In other words, it claimed the threat letter itself was copyrighted and that the recipient of it wasn't allowed (ooh, an Allowed Cloud!) to post it online.

Welp, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tested this law firm's warped theory by posting the threatening letter. It turns out that more and more companies have been bullying consumers by hiring law firms that send out nasty letters and then tell them these letters are copyrighted and can't be posted the Internet. They effectively scare consumers into shutting up about the company's actions. It's basically a new form of SLAPP lawsuit threat.

Maybe the law firm thinks it can copyright the letter because the whole basis of the firm's threat is fiction.

Now the dumb losers who compose the law firm that sent the threatening letter have developed another bizarre interpretation of copyright law. Now they're saying copyright law bans folks from viewing the shitty HTML source of its website. You know, like in Exploder when you click on "Source" under the "View" tab. That's what they mean. They don't mean copying it. They mean just viewing it - even though almost every ordinary Internet user has this feature on their browser in plain sight that lets them view a site's HTML source with ease. (You can even do it with this blog!)

The law firm claims, "As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so." (For all you legal eagles, me offering this brief quote from the law firm is protected as fair use. So there. Nyeh.)

Geniuses, it's called copyright, not viewright. Copyright only applies when someone copies something.

This is like if the RIAA sued someone for looking at the stylus on their record player. (The DMCA is so sweeping that they probably could!) What's next? Suing Microsoft for daring to have a feature that lets you view a site's HTML code, a feature that's probably been standard on every graphical browser for a dozen years?

The law firm is also trying to force another website to remove criticism about a client because the law firm didn't grant permission to utter the client's name. It also won't allow its own clients to say they're represented by them (proving the law firm is embarrassed by its own clients).

Further investigation proves that this law firm also helps clients send out e-mail spam. These self-described "spam lawyers and spam attorneys" (to use their redundant phrase) offer to show clients how to "legitimately and legally send unsolicited email to third parties." Unsolicited e-mail? That's spam - even if it's legal under some loophole. But what do you expect from a law firm that counts infomercial businesses among its clients? Infomercials are the TV version of spam.

For being such legal experts, they sure do have some goofy ideas on copyrights though. And I suspect they know their copyright ideas are wrong - because there's no way in hell anybody could possibly be so stupid as to think they can copyright a cease-and-desist letter or bar someone from viewing a website's HTML code.

(Source: http://www.infomercialblog.com/?p=138;
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071005/174623.shtml;
http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2007/10/dont-publish-th.html;
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071017/092927.shtml)