In haste -

Charming bit of e-TWOC-ing here.

In essence, someone appears to have taken a copyright article distributed via the author’s website and reprinted it for profit, then responded to a request that a moderate remuneration be paid to a charity with a rather snotty note. Naturally, I have no direct knowledge of this, so I’m responding to the incident as reported.

Thoughts:

1. statutory damages for infringement in the US are between $750 and $30,000, falling to $200 if the defendant show they were not aware and had no reason to believe they were infringing and rising as high as $150,000. (Wrinkle: the US has copyright registration.) So $100 looks like a bargain to me.

2. I would be unwilling to work with an editor who included the following statement in an email: If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Not only is this rude, it is grammatically shaky and stylistically weak.

3. This is exactly the sort of situation which makes me unhappy with campaigns to loosen copyright laws: such changes seem to invite just this sort of situation, where a creative produces a piece of work for the online world and someone up and prints it and makes money from it and claims it’s ‘public domain’, which it patently is not.

4. I like TWOCing as a metaphor for this sort of anti-social but not exactly high-grade form of infringement. Piracy is a silly word.