The fact that they “demand compensation” for people who are “stealing their intellectual property” by doing EXACTLY the same thing they pay others to do, completely validates the point I was making earlier.

Maybe it has to do with the salaries of the lawyers involved, or am I being cynical?

“Get over yourself” ignores the real tragedy of all this. As do many of the other comments here. The real issue is reflected in my name – civility. We have slowly, but with increasing speed, walked away from it. We no longer seem to care much, as a society or even a world, about other human beings. If he said it or wrote it, he should be given the courtesy of being asked. If it was used, he should be credited.

If he said, “no”, the ad agency could have used other words, or worked with someone else to get their script written. Or used them anyway and risked a lawsuit, and, if the rest of us cared (were civil), we would shun the product when we discovered the truth.

There are millions, if not billions of lines that could have been written with the same effect as those used in the ad. Instead of being creative or hiring someone to write them, they plagiarized someone else’s work and got paid for it.

I don’t care what the law says, using someone else’s work and implying it is your own, or profiting from it without citing the author is uncivil, and, as a result, uncaring. If we continue on this path, we are doomed as a species.

And it wasn’t just a few words; it was the entire script of the commercial. It might have only been a small part of Aaronson’s lecture, but it was *all* of the commercial.

I don’t know if he can sue (in the US he could, since you can sue anyone for anything, but Australian law is probably different), and I don’t know if he would win if he did (IANAL, but others here claiming to have some knowledge say he wouldn’t prevail), but if I were him (he? – the English language purists want to get on this?), I would at least talk to a lawyer about it.

The best outcome would be if he gets some free publicity out of this, people check out his lectures, he gets a fat book deal, and inspires a new generation of skeptics and models who actually know something about quantum mechanics. That, or he gets to meet the models.

On the other hand, you can hardly blame the ad agency for not seeking permission, because it is such a trivial use. Do they really have to get into negotiating with an author just for a few words? Waste time and sleep bouncing emails and phone calls across the dateline? Waste money calling in their corporate lawyer to draft a contract so that the agency won’t be open to litigation? There has to be a certain level of triviality below which it’s just too complicated — “The law does not concern itself with trifles”.

Personally I’d be tickled pink if I was quoted in an ad, providing it was for something good what I wrote, and not something I’d be embarrassed to have quoted. Even without credit, it would still be worth mad props.