Yes. Yes he did.

It might be considered a victory of sorts, but I wouldn’t get too excited unless other judges agree with this judge.

Allow me to rephrase my central point. This judge seems to be applying copyright laws as they are written. So I wouldn’t get too excited about the “breakthrough” victory here. In this particular case, at least, all systems appear to be functioning normally.

Therfore, to raise the alarms or high-five each other that copyrights MAY have been weakened here, that is wrong. The safeguards against violationg the premise, “ideas are free” has been simply preserved. Ideas are still free, within the meaning of the copyrights statutes.

My thanks to Mr. Oliva, however unintentional it may have been, for illustrating how it actually works.

I was with you right up to here:

The copyright lobby expends a great deal of energy maintaining, without evidence, that copying “diminishes” the market for a given work.

The object of the lobbyist’s efforts is favorable legislation. In the context of legal proceedings, there are plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. The ruling on harm merely states that a general claim of harm is not sufficient to show legal harm. The concept is “actual harm”, not speculative harm. Unfortunately, the legislative threshold is not quite so high.

On the standing issue, my opinion is that the intended trolling could have been accomplished by simply substituting a contingency agreement for the assignment. In such an arrangement, the copyright holder would be the plaintiff and would have standing. The lawyer could continue to exploit his business plan (trolling) without being tossed out for lack of standing.

That leaves us with the Fair Use doctrine and the proper subject matter of copyrights.

First, despite the “ideas are free” line of argument often recited here, which claims that there is no non-arbitrary way to distinguish between what is protectable under copyrights and what is not, (that is all “works” are merely ideas) this ruling turns on such a distinction.

Here the judge ruled that there is very little about this article that is protectable in the first place, since ideas and factual content are not, in themselves, protectable under the statute. Second, he found that even if there is protectable work involved, some creative, original expression, the use was within Fair Use, and the copyright holder is therefore there would be no infringement anyway.

Despite the troll’s supposed intent to have armed guards kidnap the offender in the middle of the night by enlisting the monopoly on aggressive coercion held by his State authorities, the copyright laws themselves, given a fair reading by the judge, defended the distinction of “protected works” and Fair Use provided under the statute. Once again, liberty prevails!

This seems like a strong argument for, not against copyrights. The system, at least in this case, seems to be working rather well.

Stephen King should listen to Nine Inch Nails.

Who knows if Stephen King would have got any MORE money if he’d sold the book the regular way?

Yes they did

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Rainbows

Then they made a DVD

http://www.kat.ph/radiohead-2010-01-24-the-music-box-the-fonda-los-angeles-ca-us-2x-multicam-dvd-ntsc-t4888978.html