How could this possibly infringe on somebody's copyright? </sarcasm>

[robkelk]

Appeals Court Reviews 'Star Trek'/Dr. Seuss Mashup

An attempt to place mashups on par with parody in terms of copyright law didn't sit well with Ninth Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown.

[Dragonflight]

What I find generally disturbing about their current decision is that they are instituting a Napoleonic test model. To wit, ComicMix is presumed guilty by definition, and has to prove it isn't, by somehow proving the published work does not infringe on the plaintiff's revenue generating potential. Without exhaustive access to the plaintiff's financial records (which they almost certainly won't get,) that's impossible. It's *why* Napoleonic law is not used in Western democracies. The moment you are presumed guilty in the trial, you need extraordinary access to the other sides' materials to prove you're not, which is almost without exception impossible to do.

Edit: The reason it's impossible to do hearkens back to the decision that companies were granted the same status and protections that people were. In order to gain extraordinary access to a company's records, you have to be able to demonstrate a clear chain of evidence showing the path to the incriminating documentation you believe they possess. Fishing expeditions, where you comb through their records before you even know what you're looking for, are prohibited, since a person is guaranteed protection against unlawful search and seizure.

In order for someone being presumed guilty to gain access to the other side's records for an exhaustive search, they would need to prove *first* that they knew what they were looking for. Since the whole point of this exercise is to find evidence you aren't even sure exists yet, no court would allow you to mount an unsubstantiated fishing expedition in another company's records. At that point, in the Napoleonic system, you're presumed guilty, you can't prove you aren't without access to their records you can't get, so the trial moves swiftly to sentencing.

Presumably ComicMix would challenge this whole thing in Appeals court on those grounds if the judge proceeded to convict on Napoleonic legal grounds, but at that point, it's all about the plaintiff trying to drive the smaller company out of business by bleeding them dry in court proceedings.

[Black Aeronaut]

Even so, I can't help but feel that ComicMix has screwed the pooch on this one.  This could have simply been done as a fan comic and made freely available.

Instead, they wanted people to give them money for it.

That is usually where the screaming starts - the moment someone wants to start charging money for what is really just a fan work.

The worst part is that the copyright trolls are going to feel emboldened by this, and we'll see a new rash of infringement lawsuits - primarily targeting people that put fanworks behind paywalls... But there will be collateral damage in that the copyright trolls will probably also go after others that don't seek any monetary compensation for their fanworks, arguing that even if the artist doesn't make any money from it, they're drawing from the IP owner's revenue stream.

(God forbid anyone else takes Hasbro's example with MLP:FiM and, you know, actually encourage the fanbase to generate content.)

[Labster]

I'm of the opinion that this book is definitely copyright infringement, and definitely should not be so. Ted Geisel and Gene Roddenberry have both been dead for 28 and a half years. Our long copyright terms are simply ways to ensure that the wealthy retain their money by birthright, and make it so the oligarchy can prevent the working class from accessing their own culture. But under the terms of the laws written by and for the ruling elite? Yeah, totally illegal.