intertwingly

Lucky for them that they’ve got that anachronistic “original plus five copies” snail mail requirement, or I suspect that they would be getting a lot of uncalled-for comments, from people who won’t RTFA. The “persons [who] ... will experience difficulties” are in fact the lawyers for companies producing motion pictures and sound recordings for commercial distribution. Offhand, how many movie studio lawyers would you guess use Linux?

What I like best is the opportunity for infringers to gamble: if someone preregisters, and you infringe before, or in the first two months after distribution, but the copyright owner doesn’t follow through and do final registration either within three months of distribution or one month of discovering your infringement, then the case gets thrown out and you walk. I can’t imagine what purpose that requirement serves, but I like the opportunity for gaming the system it provides.

(Though I guess entertainment lawyers with nothing but brand new Macs is a possibility, isn’t it?)

Via Tim Bray via Sam Ruby, the Copyright Office asks whether a public entity should even consider writing vendor-specific markup. At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office’s system for online preregistration, it is not...

I think thats dumb but snail mail will always be around and none should ever rely on email for anything except spam!