Friday, February 05, 2010

Women glow and men chunder

Let's see if we can't talk the women into joining us in chundering over this abuse of the courts.

Norm Lurie is a dirtbag.
Posted by Al at 8:48 AM
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5 comments:

T. F. Stern said...

You better run, you better take cover...anytime there are greedy fortune seekers who can take a chance of the court system lottery.

8:37 PM
Al said...

Yep.

9:13 AM
The probligo said...

There is a parallel happening in NZ - concerning the "inadvertent plagiarism" of existing published texts.

Example; author of a novel on early NZ history extracts a paragraph from a history textbook and includes it in his novel without attribution.

Example; newspaper columnist reads a book and enjoys it. A short time later publishes a column on a very similar topic and writes in a para very similar/identical to a passage in the book ...

and so it goes. Point is; where is the line?

4:48 PM
Al said...

That brings up the question, for me, of what copyright should be. A song like "Kookaburra" has been in the Australian culture so long, and has even transferred over here - I learned the song in gradeschool in the early seventies - it sort of plays in the background in my head whenever I think of Australia...unless "Down Under" is playing... I don't think they lifted the tune consciously, and in fact I don't think the song is as similar as "My Sweet Lord" and whatever the tune is that the Beatles are supposed to have ripped that off from.

Your examples seem more obviously plagiarism (the first, a lot; the second, a little) than these two songs. And, with "Down Under" and "Kookaburra", I think we've got to consider the time...uh...difference. You've got '37 to '82 and then '82 to 2009 before anybody complains? In neighbor law, if you don't complain about your neighbor having his fence over the property line for five years, you've lost that property. That's what they say here, anyway.

11:55 PM
The probligo said...

Interesting example that last one.

Land ownership here is evidenced by a Certificate of Title which defines the legal description of the land plus a small plan showing the boundary lines. Behind the legal description lies a Survey Plan, which is also put through a fairly rigourous bureaucratic process.

The example of the fence is best illustrated by a similar NZ example. Two neighbours owned properties which had "Limited to Parcels" titles; the result of very old (1870 something) and inaccurate surveying. There was a dispute about the common boundary which was resolved by a new survey. The result was that one of them found to his horror that he did not own two feet more into the neighbours property as he claimed but in fact the neighbour owned the right hand two feet of his house. Settlement was by way of agreement on the presumed existing boundary with a "settlement caveat" on both properties.

12:52 AM

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