Scraping the Bottom

I thought that with the whole Kevin Corazza plagiarism incident that we had hit the bottom of the "stupid plagiarist" barrel. I was wrong (Note: Duggmirror link used since original image no longer available).

While very little is known about this image, what is going on is pretty self-evident. A thief was leeching another site's images, both plagiarizing the pictures and stealing the site's bandwidth. This prompted the owner of the original site to either alter the location of the files of or remove the images. That, in turn prompted the plagiarist to write a letter where he threatened to contact his attorney if the images were not restored.

The comments to the Digg post really say it all. The guy is a "moron" and seems to think that he can "sue for anything."

However, the case does illustrate some of the misconceptions people have about both copyright law and how the Web works. Clearly this individual is very ignorant of both or s/he would not be lobbing such empty threats.

In the end, it is unlikely that anything other than a funny Digg post will come out of this. If he does go to an attorney regarding this, the lawyer will likely just explain to him the reality of the situation and send him on his way. No self-respecting attorney would pursue this.

Then again, I might be in for an ugly surprise…

tags: Plagiarism, Content+Theft, Copyright+Infringement, Digg, Copyright