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.

Still one expects their ability to copy others’ works to be excellent….

http://www.switched.com/2007/09/21/virgin-mobile-steals-teens-flickr-photo-for-ad/

Because of all this BS brouhaha that’s being generated about it, FAR MORE PEOPLE ARE WATCHING THE COMMERCIAL THAN EVER WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE.

They won. You handed them the victory. It’s the “Only The Good Die Young” effect in action yet again.

A long time ago, I made a quip about the English language [1]. It’s since appeared on t-shirts, in sig-files, in an English as a Second Language text over in China and more recently, it’s been showing up in SF books. The Red Chinese asked permission but the SF writers never do, even when they know who said it. Sometimes they don’t and are under the impression that it’s [trad].

I was very alarmed when it was attributed to Captain James T. Kirk in one Trek novel because I reeeally don’t want a million Trekkies arguing that Kirk said it first but the author and I worked something out.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#The_Purity_of_the_English_Language

Not only wouldn’t McCartny and the Lennon estate have no recourse to sue, but fair use quotations from their songs happens *all the time* in modern media. So much so that “in the words of the song, all you need is love” has become a cliché.

Again, I would equate this more with someone lifting a passage straight from a book or the lyrics of a song and using them as the entire script for a new creative piece. While using the odd phrase that has become a famous and ubiquitous quotation like “All you need is love” would surely be considered fair use, I fail to see how an ad agency would be able to get away with, say, the whole first of the Beatles classic “Help” without falling foul of copyright law.

Anyway, I know the odds of winning a law suit are minimal, and the sad thing is that the ad agency will continue to lie about their conduct rather than admit they are at fault because they no doubt fear that they would leave themselves open to a law suit. If they’d have simply used common courtesy in the first place, none of this fuss needed to have happened.

On the other hand, the fact that these giant corporations feel as though they can plagiarize the intellectual property of others does make me somewhat angry. What’s to stop them at a few paragraphs? This kind of rationale could be extended and applied to all sorts of intellectual theft. If I had written those lines, I would have hoped to get some credit for it. The West Wing stealing lines from Phil must be an example of how blatant these bastards are, when looking for something original to write. Maybe they should all keep a scientist, or a science writer on staff for these types of situations.

Could you imagine having to attribute every single line you use from a popular movie? The law doesn’t recognize popularity in copyright, as a matter of leveling the playing field.

I can understand the idea that people may want to be asked for permission before fair-use is applied. However, according to the law as it stands, getting a “no” does not restrict the rights of the inquirer to use the work anyway. This means the creation of an extra-legal tradition of asking permission may soon become a socially restrictive standard. Don’t believe me? Look at the case of one Keith Ellison and his Qur’an oath. Look at the poisonous societal stink over a perfectly legal act was ultimately innocuous.

Similarly, could you imagine if Fox News could apply that kind of societal pressure to the Daily Show for using clips that criticize Fox without permission? Don’t tell me it’s any different, complacency and tradition is how we ended up with common-law marriage. In an age where companies are suing people left and right in a flurry of IP extremist lawsuits and lobbyists roam Washington, fair-use is far from evil.

There is a myth that fair-use is ill defined. It’s very well defined, and easy to figure out on one’s own. Let’s not give those companies the societal support they need to push amendments and convolutions to a perfectly clear law. If that means we have things yanked unceremoniously from our blogs every now and again, so be it. Just remember that what it means we can put in our blogs in return.

The author probably has no legal recourse, and the ad agency should have (and should now) offer him compensation. Legal recourse may be a non-option, but if he can make a big enough stink about it, Ricoh will lose sales. Maybe only a fraction of a percent – but if you doubt they’d be unaware or uncaring about it, think again. These companies didn’t get to be huge by not caring about the last bent penny.

Being at work I can only skim the related links… did I miss something where Scott Araonson himself expresses dismay over the appropriation of a few lines he wrote?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Ricoh lawyers sued You Tube for stealing “intellectual property?”

“While Ricoh Australia accepts there are certainly incidental similarities between the script and Dr Aaronson’s lecture, out of its original context, the sentence’s purpose has been transformed from education to entertainment,” a spokeswoman said.

I think that right there indicates that the ad company is full of it. “Incidental”? They’re identical! Obviously, they are in full spin mode.

Like I said, I doubt he can sue, but if this were me, I would be most upset about the lack of attribution. So much of this could have been prevented by the company exercising simple politeness, and just by asking permission.

But that’s not to say Aaronson shouldn’t be compensated. A letter from a lawyer to the ad agency (cc:ing Ricoh’s VP of marketing) seeking compensation (not threatening a suit–the fact that it’s from a lawyer says enough) should generate a few thousand bucks.

It’s not so much about copyright as about reputable business practices. An ad agency that makes its living via the creative process should be keenly attuned to the need to compensate people for their creative input.

All of the other examples listed above allude to stealing intellectual property. It is called stealing because it is not fair to the individual who made the discovery or wrote the groundbreaking paper. This example is not like that. The concepts and ‘intellectual property’ which was quoted in the commercial is by no means novel or groundbreaking. The only reason why it is made to sound bad is because the string of words spoken were in the same order as the lecturer.

The only reason a lawsuit would be valid is if they stole intellectual concepts from another source and claimed them as their own instead of using a particular string of words. They did not steal the concepts being spoken because the principles of quantum mechanics do not belong to the lecturer referenced.

If they do get sued, I am going to hire a lawyer to follow me around and copyright every sentence I utter.

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