Copyright Fears
I am amazed at the kind of email I've been receiving lately. Fearful email but only one of them has any good reason to be fearful. However, he doesn't realize what that reason is. I subscribe to several email lists and I do my best to be helpful to the alcoholics there, but occasionally, very occasionally, I'll realize that my answer has application to Jewish alcoholics or alcoholics in general so I will write about it here on this blog. But when I mention that I write for a blog, some alcoholics get immediately paranoid. They become fearful.
I can hardly blame them. I think they are wrong, but it is understandable. Many of these people are not very stable (mentally) and frankly there is nothing I can do or say that could help them. But one man had a valid complaint so when he contacted me directly, I held a conversation with him. He seems like a nice guy.
He is worried that something he writes on the email list might find its way to this blog. Even with assurances from me that they wouldn't, he remains fearful. That is silly, but where he is correct is this: he is worried about certain copyright issues. Perfectly right to worry.
Authors of commercial works must use care not only with the things they write in public but also the things they read. I remember Dr. Laura Schlesinger being sued for writing a book because another author believed that Dr. Laura had stolen some ideas from a different book. Well... there is nothing new under the sun so it might be possible that Dr. Laura read the book and it might have sparked an idea that she later forgot where it came from, or she simply had a parallel idea with no connection. How can one prove this? It becomes a problem and most businesses will simply pay the fine and make it go away, but for a new author such an accusation can be devastating whether true or not.
If an author is on an AA list and he subsequently uses ideas he finds on that list to enrich himself, someone on that list might sue him. It is probably best to not read the list. Therefore he has the defense that he never knew what was on the list. He never read it. Parallel ideas can occur to people. It is not a crime.
So I suggested that he leave the list for that simple reason. He is an author. He must protect his copyright from the danger of lawsuit. If he was worried about that (and he certainly seemed to be) he should have maintained his anonymity. Shucks. I think he even gave out his phone number to the general list. Not very smart.
Alcoholics are sick people. They might do anything. That's why they are called "sick".
Oh... one more thing. If some of the people that have been sending me strange paranoid email thinks I am talking about them on this blog... I'm not. Really. I'm talking about someone else entirely.... someone very, very sick.
OK. Back to work.
I can hardly blame them. I think they are wrong, but it is understandable. Many of these people are not very stable (mentally) and frankly there is nothing I can do or say that could help them. But one man had a valid complaint so when he contacted me directly, I held a conversation with him. He seems like a nice guy.
He is worried that something he writes on the email list might find its way to this blog. Even with assurances from me that they wouldn't, he remains fearful. That is silly, but where he is correct is this: he is worried about certain copyright issues. Perfectly right to worry.
Authors of commercial works must use care not only with the things they write in public but also the things they read. I remember Dr. Laura Schlesinger being sued for writing a book because another author believed that Dr. Laura had stolen some ideas from a different book. Well... there is nothing new under the sun so it might be possible that Dr. Laura read the book and it might have sparked an idea that she later forgot where it came from, or she simply had a parallel idea with no connection. How can one prove this? It becomes a problem and most businesses will simply pay the fine and make it go away, but for a new author such an accusation can be devastating whether true or not.
If an author is on an AA list and he subsequently uses ideas he finds on that list to enrich himself, someone on that list might sue him. It is probably best to not read the list. Therefore he has the defense that he never knew what was on the list. He never read it. Parallel ideas can occur to people. It is not a crime.
So I suggested that he leave the list for that simple reason. He is an author. He must protect his copyright from the danger of lawsuit. If he was worried about that (and he certainly seemed to be) he should have maintained his anonymity. Shucks. I think he even gave out his phone number to the general list. Not very smart.
Alcoholics are sick people. They might do anything. That's why they are called "sick".
Oh... one more thing. If some of the people that have been sending me strange paranoid email thinks I am talking about them on this blog... I'm not. Really. I'm talking about someone else entirely.... someone very, very sick.
OK. Back to work.