Eshin Direct

As posted previously, there was a furore over some guy stealing the idea for an Asia weblog awards system and implementing his own version. It looks like it’s died down now but I just find it all so amusing that people can be so hypocritical and stupid at the same time.

Apparently people have consulted intellectual property lawyers over this whole debacle as mentioned in a few posts and comments. This alone is apparently enough to convince them of the right of their argument. Excuse me while I laugh a little more. Threatening people with lawyers and having lawyers say that you have a case is not the same as being right or in fact that you would win a case in court. The legal system is in place so that these disputes are actual resolved in a court of law which may or may not entail a jury of peers. You may eventually be proven in the right and have the law back you up. But this is decided by either a judge or jury, not by your lawyer friends or your mates lawyers.

Waving the concept of lawyers in people’s faces and using that as some sort of barometer of right, with no intention of recourse to the established legal resolutory measures, is nothing more than intimidation. You can almost imagine this virtual space to be the wild west of weblogs where the no. 1 dog approaches the newcomer and runs him out of town, citing his his favoured relationship with the sheriff or the mayor. So with all this talk of legality and what is right and wrong under the intellectual property law, people should either take it to court and prove their case. Having a lawyer say you have a case isn’t the same as being right.

In this situation, it’s interesting because people have said that IP lawyers have stated that the aggrieved party has a case. He may well do. But just a cursory browse on the Internet reveals that he has to prove his case and that de facto (without a court ruling or jury decision), he doesn’t have a case. Asia Weblog Awards might be covered under the trademark law. The idea of an Asian weblog awards system cannot be copyrighted under US copyright law. Ideas cannot be copyrighted. These fall under patent law apparently. And perhaps this is why they have law courts because under US patent law, an idea has to fulfill four criteria – novelty, statutory requirement, usefulness and non-obviousness. Obviously the case is open for the mere “idea of a regional weblog awards”.

What is perhaps copyrightable is the authorship of the script that was used in the execution of the idea. However, having said that, both parties obviously have used two very different executions of the scripts – one handcoded them, the other apparently has used a script. So there is evidently no theft of copyright there.

Even more laughable is that you have some guy ranting and raving on about copyright law, calling people thieves, and being insultingly patronising to the rest of the blogging community yet he himself evidently doesn’t understand the basics of copyrighted work. Maybe I’ll change my stance on this if he at all produces any model releases for any of the photography work that he posts on his site.

But I doubt that he will produce these model releases or the evidence of the fact that the photographer has licensed him to use the images on his site. This infringement on intellectual property, and perhaps even the right to control one’s image, is more likely to see the inside of a court than the alleged IP transgressions he accuses other people of. Of course, I might be wrong and he might have all the right licenses. But IF that is the case, then he must be quite rich to throw away money on a blog site just for that. Stupid and sad too.

I’m always amazed by people’s stupidity since he’s managed to whip up a posse too. This makes Gweilo Diaries not just laughable, but downright scary. Apparently, people are willing to overlook the fact that there might be a copyright infringement on that site, so long as they get their free titillation. Evidently, someone who’s taken an idea, built his own process or inputted his own creativity from a script, promotes it in his own way is more of a demon than a guy who posts up possibly stolen images of semi-naked girls. Right…someone explain that one to me.

Before I get a whole bunch of people saying I’m bashing on “adult entertainment”, I’m not. I couldn’t care less either way. I’m merely pointing out the hypocrisy of certain individuals and sites.

Tags: Surfer Rants