Unethical Asset Manufacturing

[doktor at primenet.com]

So: with college tuition for the kiddies looming large and ugly, Sr. Siegel
resorts to trying to turn a buck on his wife's having played Mr. Wobbly
Hides His Helmet more than three decades ago with a certain well-know
literary recluse.

Apparently bereft of ideas of his own, he appropriates the words of others
to add flesh to these Frankenstein bones.  To quote Tom Leherer (in a
fair-use manner):

     "As the great Lobachevsky once said to me, 'Plagiarize, plagiarize,
     plagiarize.  Only please to call it research.'

When real publishing houses reject his pastiche (probably out of both fear
of litigation and despair at the commercial prospects for such a work), he
turns to an entity aptly described as a "Manufacturing" company, whose only
two Books In Print entries are a masturbatory aid and a how-to guide for an
obsolete computer platform.  Of course, Sr. Siegel makes a virtue of this
necessity: now he is a Noble & True Impoverished Artist.

Unsure of how to procede, the plagiarist and his "editor" send e-mails to
the people whose work they've filched, asking permission to reprint their
P-list posts.  A mere formality of course, for who would not be deeply
honored to see his name in a "book" by a man married to a woman who once
encunted Thomas Pynchon?  Or who would care?

But to their astonishment, some folks--people whose prose and ideas might
be the  electricity needed to give this creature life--are not keen on the
idea.  Having asked and been refused permission, Plan B is fallen back
onto: a denial that permission is necessary at all.  The First Amendment!
Freedom of information in cyberspace!  The Public's Right to Know!  No
fabric is too rich to be cut into hotpants for Chrissie.

Usually the legal questions are easy and the ethical ones hard.  But here,
even those who don't care if Sr. Siegel includes their e-mails concur that
it would have been better for him to have obtained permission.

Unethical.  That's the word for it, all right.

As to legality, well, as this would-be product's "editor" has smirk'd,
that's an interesting question, "interesting" in this context meaning
"expensive to find out."  Ain't no sich animal as common law copyright; 's
a statutory creature.  However, before sleeping too soundly, Sr. Siegel et
ux et al might wanna look at a case involving another reclusive American
author, the man who gave the world Holden Caufield.  That case held that an
action for copyright infringement can lie even where the author has no
intention of ever publishing if there might conceivably ever be a market
for the allegedly infringed writings. (Thanks, Metzger!)

But seriously now: "fair use"?  IAM better hope their
no-copyright-on-P-posts line holds, because the fair use doctrine sure
won't.  Taking a phrase or sentence out of an e-mail post might be fair
use; taking all or substantially all of a post is not, any more than
reprinting an entire poem would be.  If it's really IAM's position that
it's fair use to take someone's work in toto, slap some prose above and
below it, and call it your own, then I'm sure they'll have no objection to
the following:

When Sr. Siegel's asset is manufactured, let's scan it, add a dash of
prefatory, intermissionary and postlogural commentary, and post it to
various web sites, ideally those whose servers are located in countries
where it would be "interesting" to mount a legal challenge to the practice.

My fear is that l'Affaire Lineland will mute some of the best voices on the
P-list.  I'm a sentimental sap, that's all: but Siegel is right about one
thing.  The P-list is a unique and vibrant community.  Self-censorship
(whether out of fear of seeing one's loonier rants perused in book form by
a tenure committee, or out of hey-I-could-make-a-buck-off-this-idea
temptation) will ruin this list, so to those P.O.'d, I say come on back
into the ring swinging.

Cheers,

Jimmy