Hey, andrew - to save you the trouble of composing all these posts, I’ve taken the liberty of composing something which seems to sum up your ideas on most subjects: feel free to link to it whenever you feel the need to express absolutely anything on any subject whatsoever.
Wubwubwubwubwubwubwubwub! toothbrush letterbox marmalade jellyfish! WOOT WOOT WOOT! I’m a teapot! oogle oogle oogle blurp! FUCK YOU! ning ning ning ning.
I think’ll you’ll agree that as well as saving you a lot of typing, this has the advantage of being both more pithy and lucid than your usual posts.
What Steve Wright said – per the UA, what the Chicago Reader acquires is the rights to use your post: to compile it in a book, reformat it as haiku, archive it, quote from it, edit it, put it on a T-shirt, mock it, praise it, etc., as part of the deal in order to publish it. Just as when I write a letter to the editor of the NY Times, it’s theirs to print, reprint, collect in a book of “Best Letters”, edit for format and length, or wipe themselves with it. It says nothing of acquiring rights to “ideas”. So andrewt85, you’re going off half-cocked.
Are you absolutely sure it doesn’t mean they have the right to forcibly enter your house and scoop out your brain (complete with the ideas inside it) with a rusty spoon?
Case, I especially liked the bit in here about the teapot. Very sensitive and classy of you, I think. Really brings out the innerandrew85, dontchathink?
Damn you Case Sensitive, I actually choke on a saltine when I read your post. That was awesome.
andrew85 I thought you were going to be more careful in your posting and think them through. This is yet another foolish OP that makes you look incredibly dimwitted. Please stay out of the PIT for a while. Please asks questions politely and if the answers still infuriate you then consider a careful and thought out pitting.
Offer what? There is only one way to keep a secret in a forum funded and managed by a corporate entity that is accessible by the world at large from now till the archives are burned in a tragic fire 50 years from now. And that is keeping it a secret. You were the one spouting the pointless venom.
You want an anecdote. A co-worker and I are quite possibly sitting on an idea that could make us relatively wealthy. We will know by the fall of 2006 if our idea holds any water. When we discuss it, we do it in whispers. We don’t use the company email to send ideas to each other, we also try to discuss it out of the building and even there we talk in hushed tones. A message board is no different and wanting it to be is stupid.
Just to shift gears for a moment, andrewdt85, regardless of the merits of this pitting, has absorbed a hell of a lot of kidding (basically, 30 of us crawling over each other to tell the same half-dozen jokes) and a fair amount of downright venomous personal attacks (also tending toward the repetitive more than the brilliantly clever), along with a modicum of good information and advice. He has largely declined to respond in kind to the worst of the attacks, and seems to have internalized some of the well-intentioned advice. Without characterizing this thread or any other he may have started or continued, I’d like to make the point that, wrong or right, he is largely treating others better than he is being treated, if only by declining to respond (an option that was open to all of us as well).
andrewdt85, I hope you now understand the Reader’s position a little better so you don’t feel as hostile toward the SDMB. I still think your OP was ill-considered, but I regret any unkind remarks I made at your expense. I was merely showing off for other posters, and looking at the whole thread shows me how unnecessary an indulgence it was, and I’m sorry I gave in to it. Your perspective seems a little off-center to me, but in this thread at least there’s nothing wrong with your guts or your manners.
This is a bit too general. Substantial similarity doctrine is pretty complicated. Chapter 7
Copyright would not even begin to protect your inventions though. It only protects works of authorship. And if you were only posting ideas for stories, you’d be out of luck there too. Copyright only protects expressions–not ideas.
I don’t know what you mean by this. You have a copyright in creative expression as soon as it’s in a fixed form. I know of know difference between an “actual” copyright and a non-actual copyright.
Characters can be protected under both trademark and copyright law. There just has to be more to it to be copyrightable.
“Copyrighted.” And, as has been said already, something is protected under copyright law as soon as it is fixed in a perceivable form.
Just because food colouring already exists doesn’t mean you can’t get rich selling people coloured salt. There are plenty of companies that make money selling things that you could easily make yourself. Smucker’s Goober Peanut Butter and Jelly, for example.
First of all, the license doesn’t say the Chicago Reader can steal anything. Read the quote you posted. It gives them the right to use your post. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to run this message board.
Second, it’s not some legal trick. Why would you post something here if you didn’t want the Chicago Reader to make it available to other people to read? That’s what this message board is for and that’s what the agreement is for.
These are pretty technical questions of evidence and I don’t know that it really matters with regard to your general complaint. There are all kinds of ways to prove copying. You could, for example, seize the guy’s computer and see whether he ever visited the SDMB. That might be sufficient to prove access. Copyright law allows you to infer copying by proving access and substantial similarity.
Generally, under the law, there is no such thing as “stealing” an idea. Some kinds of ideas are protected under patent law, but those ideas have to be novel, useful, and non-obvious, and unlike in copyright law, you have to actually apply for patent protection; you don’t get it automatically. Ideas for stories or plots are not protectable.
It’s not quite this simple. You can copy too many details from Star Wars and fall into copyright infringement. It’s not just a matter of trademarked names. People sue over copying of movie scripts all the time and changing a few superficial details isn’t necessarily enough to save you.
You are failing to grasp that the Chicago Reader is not doing anything oppressive to you through this agreement. Without it, they could not run this board. You can’t run a board like this without obtaining some kind of right to reproduce (copy) other people’s work. They’re not stealing anything.
This scenario makes no sense. Your “ideas” for novels are not protectable. Only the actual expression in a novel is protectable. And why would you post the entire text to your novel on this board?
