Plagiarizing a Takedown Notice 113
ChipMonk writes "Over at hobbyist site OS News, editor-in-chief Thom Holwerda published a highly skeptical opinion of the announcement of Commodore USA's own Amiga line. Within hours, Commodore USA sent a takedown notice to OS News, demanding a retraction of the piece and accusing the site of libel and defamation. What's funny is that the takedown notice was mostly copied, with minor edits, from Chilling Effects, a site dedicated to publicizing attempts at squelching free speech. The formatting, line breaks, obtuse references to 'OCGA,' and even the highlighted search terms were left largely intact."
Yay!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yay!!! Thank you for this story! Whatever your point is or the controversy is supposed to be, all that matters is that I now know that there is movement again on the Commodore/Amiga front. Who knows when I would have learned about any of this otherwise? CommodoreUSA owes you a debt of gratitude for this advertising I'm sure.
Most of what brought me into the computer age was my C64 and later my Amiga. Many today won't have been old enough to remember that computer/software/game stores like Software Etc. in the malls at one point were at least half Amiga software, written by Microsoft even. If that oil barron hadn't bought out Commodore and purposely run it into the ground to bankrupt it Commodore would have shaped the entire computer industry!
Today a computer is a computer, but back then an Amiga was so far ahead of everything else it was amazing! A fully windowed multitasking color OS that was easy to use 10 years before Windows 95. Think about that shit. Even Billy Gates was writing software for it. God, what could have been... And the games for it were amazing, and not just for when they came out.
I'll have to read up on what the new version of the company is up to but good luck to them. Years ago I thought about how Amiga would be the perfect way to reintroduce the concept of a complete computer in a keyboard etc. I'm gratified to see that someone else had the same idea and dream. I hope it succeeds in some way.
Re:boilerplate (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really, but it is still copyright infringement and hence you can be sued for it.
IANAL, but Wikipedia, the most reliable legal source known to man, says that plagiarism is not a legal concept, is not the same thing as copyright infringement, and is "concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects [wikipedia.org]
Re:It Shouldn't Be (Score:2, Interesting)
The selection of words used in boilerplate are not dictated by circumstances. Many different choices of words are possible to express essentially the same idea, as with any letter.
So how is the choice of wording for a particular boilerplate letter, not a 'creative expression' ?
Re:Stolen Picture Too? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's extremely damning. For those following along at home, this [commodoreusa.net] is the image up on Commodore USA's website, and this [aminet.net] is the original image from ten years ago. The difference? The image up on Commodore USA's website has a bad photoshop hack job of removing the word "fantasy" from the top right of the keyboard, and the word fantasy from the mouse cord (and the cord itself). It still attributes the image to Marko Hirv.
I don't think there can be more irrefutable proof that this is a scam.