It doesn't matter when the last time a suit of this nature happened. The publisher paid the author so that the publisher could put it on a web site and put some advertisements on it. No matter how you feel about patents, copyrights and fair use, you have denied the publisher and ultimately the author from compensation for their work.
Oh I think that's hardly true. It sounds good but now it's just a bad argument to counter another bad argument. It's going to take more than that to convince me that anyone lost any real money, /especially/ the author, by the posting of that article (whatever it was, I didn't read it anyway so they lost no admission fee from me).
No doubt the author got paid the same for that as he would have had no one at all had read it. Of course, if he made a practice of being really that bad, he'd have a hard time making a living.
By providing just a link, or a link and an excerpt of the part you find poignant then you still allow them their due. They made an article interesting enough for you to forward to the list, they should enjoy the spoils of whatever revenue they can generate from it.
Well sure, that's only fair. But this turning all the world into a policeman lest some one be oh so unjustly deprived of every last penny of his perceived worth is getting a bit old. Must everything be owned always? I wonder how many things we can put a coin slot on.
Maybe we should also crack down on Dilbert cartoons posted in the workplace. And magazine and newspaper clippings. Put a guard on the Xerox machine. How about all those quotes in our sigs? No doubt most everyone here is significantly adding to their employers' liability by doing similar things in the workplace. Pot, meet kettle.
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Best Regards,
~DJA.
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"You never see an armored car following a hearse to the cemetery."
-- Donald P. Allen--
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