If you haven’t already, read this account from FrontPageMag that contains their response to Ted ‘He Who Fingerpaints Chickenscratch’ Rall when he tried to muscle $5000 from them via ‘Cease and Desist’ order for using his publicity pic on their ‘Discover the Network’ website.
Too Damn Funny.
Before you get too giggly at this prospect, note that Horowitz had to use his attorney to reply. Attorneys cost $$$, unless you already have some sort of agreement and have gotten them to work “pro bono”.
Sorry, I don’t agree. At the cost of the negative publicity of the moment, Rall wins this round.
Of course, that doesn’t change the historical fact that he is an asshole.
Had it happened to me, I would have PERSONNALLY told Rall to piss up a rope. If he actually sued, I would have no shortage of decent lawyers to defend me from him “pro bono”. However, no good attorney would ever slam the door on a negotiation, and all good attorneys try to resolve lawsuits by negotiation short of court. So…I would have counter-offered Rall the sum of $0.02 for use of his work, putting him on notice that I think that his idea of what his stuff is worth is quite over-inflated.
That way, he doesn’t get the satisfaction of knowing that he caused me to have to pay a couple of hundred to have a lawyer write a letter, and it immediately puts our conflict on a David vs. Goliath basis, which is a decent way to go in Federal Court if you have to.
The Federal Court system has huge lattitude for individuals who defend SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) actions. Some states even bar these type of suits now.
Also, this would be an important case to try, because if the First Amendment is to mean anything to bloggers, we must have the freedom to re-post whatever we see on the free medium of the internet.
In other words, this case might have decided, once and for all, if the Internet is really free.
Anyway, there’s another way to defeat Rall here: Blogstorm. If 2000 righty blogs reposted that picture, he couldn’t sue them all, because his attorney wouldn’t go to all that work for such small gains.