Law-firm: copyright prohibits "view source" on our page
This law firm includes a term in its website's "User Agreement" that's a new one for me:Link (Thanks, Greg!)We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. 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.
That's kind of like a puppet show invoking copyright to prohibit the audience from looking at the strings. The user agreements of the law firm and one of its clients also contain a bunch of terrible terms that have become all too common: a prohibition on linking to the site, copying anything from the site (even if its fair use), and even referring to the website owner by name. The law firm doesn't even allow its own *clients* to say they're represented by the firm without permission.
the latest
latest episodes
As you may know, a television picture is made up of a series of colored dots called pixels, which you can inspect by getting really close to the screen. We do not permit you to inspect the precise layout of these pixels, as we consider that layout to be our intellectual property. You are therefore not authorized to approach your television screen while our content is displayed on it.
Ridiculous. Sounds like an excellent excuse not to hire this firm!
This is the sort of thing that gives lawers in general a bad name, and the reason lawer jokes exist.
To go through so much school, and come out so dumb on the other end is hard to comprehend.
Unfortunately, the firm has, in all likelihood, seen a huge spike in visits due to the article itself.
I'm going to 'view source' and print it out as a temporary wall paper.
This is my favourite on-line dictionary, a crazy and somewhat ugly mish-mash of languages and trivia:
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.com/definition/set
Its assembly has apparently been through much scavenging of public-domain material. Terms of use?
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.com/credits/termsofuse1.html
So, if you intend to harvest, copy or mine this site for its content, definitions or translations, know that you are violating the terms of this site and performing an illegal act that puts the site at risk. All pages are protected by international copyright laws. By using this site you agree to (exception: the only terms that apply to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, articles are the ones specified in the GNU FREE DOCUMENTATION LICENSE): NOT ELECTRONICALLY COPY ANY PAGES with the intent of creating new commercial or non-commercial Internet sites or publications or products & NOT ANALYZE OR COPY THE SOURCE CODE with the intent of creating new commercial or non-commercial Internet sites or publications or products & NOT DOWNLOAD PAGES with the intent of creating new commercial or non-commercial Internet sites or publications or products.
Note: "The penalties for infringement are very harsh: the court can award up to $150,000 for each separate act of willful infringement. Willful infringement means that you knew you were infringing and you did it anyway. Ignorance of the law, though, is no excuse. If you don't know that you are infringing, you still will be liable for damages - only the amount of the award will be affected. Then there are attorneys' fees..... "
Whoops. Broke the law. It's so easy these days ;-)
If they forbid me to view their HTML code, how do they expect my computer to render their web page? Perhaps they should pull all the HTML and merely post password-protected PDF files.
And then they can have all their briefs engraved upon boxwood slabs, for reproduction purposes.
If I were to hire a law firm, (certainly not these jokers!) I would be free to state that I had retained their services, whether they like it or not - it's the First Amendment.
Uh, you have to actually download the code from the site in order to even view the page, it's all in your temp net directory anyway -- you're just viewing the code that you've already got on your own HD. In order for the statement to even be readable, you've got to copy the code by the simple act of browsing to it.
This is about as ludicrous as the copyright statement on littlekenadie.com!
I own the copyright on the colour red (#ff0000). That law firm can expect a lawsuit any minute now.
(btw, they use tables for layout.)
Well, they do have something to protect. Check out this glorious function:
From now on, I'm copyrighting the types of pens and paper I use to draw. Not the actual materials themselves, just the knowledge of what specific brands I prefer.
Priceless - both the law firm in question and this nugget of succinct analysis: "That's kind of like a puppet show invoking copyright to prohibit the audience from looking at the strings."
This post is approved for viewing only. Approving, moderating, editing or understanding this post will be punished to the full extent of the law.
Looks like they already changed it. They still prohibit links and unauthorized references.
In any case, it's really bad HTML. All layout done via tables. All formatting embedded in tags, with no stylesheet in sight. They don't close off their paragraph tags. Hell, they don't even close off some of their table cells. Liberal use of non-breaking spaces to pad things out.
Truly awful.
Oops! My mistake. I was looking at the Inventor site, not the law firm.
They seem to have removed that part of the agreement.
Oops, made the same mistake ;)
Well, what else could one expect from a bunch of attorneys. At least they came out from under the rock long enough to think of a new reason to try to bog down the court system even more.
"They seem to have removed that part of the agreement."
Perhaps they realized that copyright does not prohibit the act of READING the copyrighted text...
i just read it as saying
"heres the sort of mistakes we will make while representing you as a client."
I doubt they're so dumb to actually think it's protected.
IMO they know what's up, but decide to write that BS anyway. To scare potentialy problematic encounters... maybe there was SOMETHING in this code that had to be "protected"?
And... with current understanding of IP of average person it might have worked. People around the world start thinking that whatever is made by someone has to become property... and if it's not material - IP.
Piracy is theft you know ;).
I have to say, I'm not that upset about being prohibited from viewing their HTML.
Urgh
This law firm has themselves violated copyright law.
They are required to publish acknowledgment that the copyright for a certain pop-up script that they use on their site is owned by www.mindpalette.com.
They may in fact include the required copyright notice in the page source, :-) but since they expressly forbid reading the source, that notice effectively remains unpublished.
It wouldn't surprise me if the same thing has happened with the stock photo images used in this site.
There seems to be an increasing tendency to view copyright as having restrictions on uses which aren't enumerated in the copyright statute (i.e. things other than copying, sale, lease, creation of derivative work, and public performance). It unfortunately goes beyond this one crappy law firm. For instance, the assertions of the big sports leagues that you're not allowed to create accounts of the game or share statistics about it without their permission.
Keith
Actually, to their credit, they do have a page about copyright infringement that never once calls it theft.
Of course, I can't link to it without their permission. :)
My actual favorite parts are:
1) You can't use their name, you can't link to them, and search engines are not allowed to index their site. So how is anyone supposed to find them?
2) They prohibit search engines from indexing the site, but their robots.txt file only disallows a few sub-directories, none of which include their actual content pages. The tech is there to accomplish their desire, but they don't know enough to use it.
Why didn't they just server-side the html in script?
Someone's looking for their 15 days of internet fame.
I believe it's time we start petitioning Congress to make attempts at including such blatantly unlawful and unconscionable terms in unnegotiated license "agreements" civilly actionable. If one could start a class action suit against such idiots, corporate lawyers might pay more attention to making sure such agreements are equitable.
I looked at the code. So sue me.
I know it's so last month, but I also LOLCatted this. So sue me twice:
LOL Code
Jim.
At what point do we have to start considering people like this to be trolls and ignoring them? Certainly if somebody were actually being *sued* over something like this it would be newsworthy.
However, it is entirely possible that the "(1) post absurd and unenforceable legal threats (2) tell some bloggers (3) look stupid but gets tons of free traffic" strategy will be used intentionally for business purposes. The linked-to blog didn't even rel=nofollow the link to these bastards. I bet their site's search engine rankings are about to go through the roof.
Seriously. You guys are bragging about not just going to their website, but viewing the source and reading that too. Don't you feel like you're being used?
No more used than when I catch myself enjoying an episode of Friends.
cs, i think it's important to bring up things like this. george bush has proven that if people 'think' the government, or lawyers, can do something that they can actually get away with it, regardless of what the law actually says.
it's important to point out to people, who would otherwise be clueless and assume that lawyers would know what the law is, that they are in fact creating these things out of thin air
"As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code"
Er, then why do you send it to me? New rule: if you don't want me to look at your precious secrets, then do not show them to me!
"They seem to have removed that part of the agreement."
It's not an agreement. For it to be an agreement, I'd need to agree to it, which I don't.
"This law firm has themselves violated copyright law."
Somebody call the cops!
"At what point do we have to start considering people like this to be trolls and ignoring them?"
The problem is that false, fraudelent copyright claims do very real damage. I'm a Project Gutenberg volunteer. Since Google announced it would scan a lot of books, there's been a spate of scanning projects. Some of these projects falsely claim some sort of right on scans of public domain works. Although I know these claims are bogus, other people might not, and they might be scared away from using these works as they fit.
Furthermore I believe that BoingBoing should use OpenID
Cached page with original text
I can't believe anyone would actually try to pull this.
I accidentally broke their license and noticed that they are using Google Analytics on this site. I'm guessing that they are not the owners/creators of that bit of code.... http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html
Just wondering, has anyone actually succeeded in enforcing a ban on linking to their site? I can understand trying to copyright your source code, but don't see how in the wildest stretch of the imagination copyright could be interpreted to ban linking to or referencing a site. It would be analogous to not allowing someone to mention the title of a book or a movie or the street address of a business.
"That's kind of like a puppet show invoking copyright to prohibit the audience from looking at the strings."
Hey, totally not fair to puppeteers.
Though it might be a better analogy than you intended. A marionettist often does have a proprietary stringing arrangement. In fact, until the 1920s, marionette productions often employed bouncers to make sure no one was trying to sneak a peak around back at how the puppets were controlled. The "open source" proponent of modern puppetry, Tony Sarg, got around this by buying front row tickets to shows, stretching out on the floor and watching the controls.
Dan Winchester has a web page that allows you to enter a URL and display the source.
http://www.dan.co.uk/viewsource/
Do NOT click on the following link. It will automagically display the valuable IP of the useful lawfirm, and you will be in violation of their copyright.
Again, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK!
http://www.dan.co.uk/viewsource/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cybertriallawyer.com%2Fuser-agreement
All your eyeballs are belong to us!
Copyright, ideas, marketing..... All well and good of them to want to help us all with those ideas.
I Wonder if Miguel Duhamel, American Honda, or the American Motorcyclist Association know this site is using copyright images that belong to all three as the header to their homepage. And, if so, what royalties are they paying?
There are plenty of 'generic' royalty-free images they could have used for that shot.
Just an observation, as I never recall Honda agreeing to their propriety images being used to advertise unrelated products.
TJ
@Jimkennedy: U haz made mah day. Now what I do wif it?
My first LOLCat and a positive review. WooHoo!
What u do wif ur day? Seize it Robert. Seize it good.
That's really goofy! I think bloggers need some ludicrous legalese of their own. You know, "TERMS OF USE. By letting your eye graze the banner on this website or even simply its URL, you agree that I have the right to link to and discuss publicly available material on this website, no matter what your sucker-ass small print says on your own lame-o site. If you employ me, you agree not to fire me or discipline me in connection with anything I have written here, and you agree to give me a raise next week. If you provide goods or services to me, you agree not to sue me for complaining with cause about the quality of said goods or services, on this very website or elsewhere. Also, you agree that you are feeling very sleepy. By the time I count to three, you will agree that you are a chicken. One, two, three."