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A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

abovethelaw.com

151–160 of 172 posts

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#151

This reminds me about how important it is to have a solid lawyer, and an understanding of the legal ecosystem. Even in cases like this with typos, "respond in ten (10) days" can be quite intimidating, especially when there's a money/legal power asymmetry. In one such case, Monster Cable issued a C&D to a much smaller, Blue Jeans Cable. The founder actually worked in litigation for 19 years and I found this portion of…

> It's almost a negative version of the Tragedy of the Commons / Public Goods Dilemma. If every small company stood up and said "no, we will not settle" then there would be far less incentive to pursue bogus infringement claims. On the other hand, it always, locally, makes sense not to challenge claims and let some other small company deal with it.

If you're looking for the name of that dynamic, that's a pretty classic Prisoner's Dilemma. :)

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#152
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear, I dont understand why people do it either, it just seems like all it adds is pagination and embedding for their pdf document which already has readers custom built for the task? If you want to make something for presentation on the web dont make a pdf.

PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web, but sribd certainly sucks.

"PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web"

Except when you want to link to somewhere in the middle of it, or view it on a resource-constrained device, or reflow the text to a window size of your own choosing, or or or...

More here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumpt...

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#153
post #90
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago, someone taught me a very handy trick for determining whether to use the subject or object form: rephrase the sentence somehow so instead of who/whom, you're using he/him (or she/her, if you're so inclined). If "she" sounds right, use "who"; if "him" sounds right, it's "whom".

I learnt an even better trick: don't use it. Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar. "It is I." "Bad grammar is something up with which I shall not put." "This is an historic occasion." And so on....

> Or rather, only use it if you intend to go the whole hog and comply with all the pedantic, pseudo-latinate prescriptions of traditional formal English grammar.

The who/whom I/me distinction isn't a pseudo-Latinate grammatical prescription - it's the last vestages of overt case marking in English. An + words starting with "h" is a phonological side-effect of h-dropping in some dialects.

The preposition stranding thing, though, is pseudo-Latinate prescriptivism. That and the supposed wrongness of split infinitives are my two biggest annoyances with "proper" grammar.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page is for the first edition of the book.

Indeed, here is the second edition: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Piano-President-Patrick-Wensink...

Awesome, thanks for the info.

He still didn't remove the obvious branding ties all over his website, but at least he did change the physical cover, I'm still not convinced it worked out as well as JD would have liked.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quoted verbatim, the semicolon is used incorrectly. It should be a comma.

what are the rules of semicolon/colon use?

Semicolons are used in two ways, to separate related independent clauses: "I entered the room; it stank." and as a kind of "super comma" when separating lists of items that themselves contain commas: spam; eggs and spam; spam, egg, sausage, and spam; and spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam.

The use here is the first case, and it's incorrect because (as another respondent has pointed out) the first clause is not independent (i.e. cannot stand on its own).

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#156
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear, I dont understand why people do it either, it just seems like all it adds is pagination and embedding for their pdf document which already has readers custom built for the task? If you want to make something for presentation on the web dont make a pdf.

PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web, but sribd certainly sucks.

I could have sworn they invented web pages for that.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does JD have a trademark claim here in the first place? AIUI, trademark is not a tool to protect the manufacturer/seller of a product, but a tool to protect the consumer, to help them avoid confusion in believing that a similar-looking product is from the brand "owning" the trademark. How can a book (especially an ebook!) be confused as a Jack Daniels product? Surely the purchaser has no expectation that they'll…

You can buy a Jack Daniels T-shirt with the label printed on it. Presumably, no one thinks they can drink a T-shirt, but the product is produced by (or at least licensed by) Jack Daniels.

If the controversy were over copyrights (presumably JD holds a copyright on their label), where the book cover reproduces that copyrighted work, then I'd get it. The T-shirt would be subject to the same copyright concerns, and need to license the image.

But the referenced letter explicitly says it's a trademark issue. I can't see how consumers are potentially confused between a book bearing a particular product on its cover, and that product itself.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there no push for "the looser pays all the costs" in the US? It works in many countries around the world, and it would prevent unjustified legal bullying.

Would that also prevent smaller entities from suing larger ones for fear of having to eat the gigantic legal fees if they lost? I see the benefits from both systems, not sure which I would be a proponent of.

Why would there be any asymetry of legal fees depending on company size?

Suing a small entity would take exactly as much lawyers on both sides as suing a huge entity. If you're fighting Bigcorp and they're somehow justifying $10million of lawyers for the case, and you feel that you're right, then you'll be justified in bringing $10million of lawyers on your side, paid in full by them.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that also prevent smaller entities from suing larger ones for fear of having to eat the gigantic legal fees if they lost? I see the benefits from both systems, not sure which I would be a proponent of.

Why would there be any asymetry of legal fees depending on company size? Suing a small entity would take exactly as much lawyers on both sides as suing a huge entity. If you're fighting Bigcorp and they're somehow justifying $10million of lawyers for the case, and you feel that you're right, then you'll be justified in bringing $10million of lawyers on your side, paid in full by them.

Obviously, you'd be expecting to win the case, but litigation doesn't always go as planned. If I'm SmallCorp suing BigCorp, I may have one in house lawyer who is handling the litigation. SmallCorp Lawyer charges hourly rate X. BigCorp has a large legal team and put many times as many lawyer man-hours at rate X into the case, and somehow pulls out a litigation victory.

There is always a non-zero risk of losing the suit. BigCorp doesn't have to worry as much existential risk if they lose, since the penalty of paying legal fees may not cripple them.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#160
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Whom" is archaic and generally not used in English anymore anyways. Overzealous and misguided efforts to save the word have scarred generations of youngsters.

We must speak with different people, because I hear it commonly used in the correct manner.

I can guarantee with near 100% certainty that unless you deal with people who speak in a formal style as their normal vernacular, you do not hear it either commonly nor consistently used in a correct manner.

- the OED remarks "whom is 'no longer current in natural colloquial speech'" and notes multiple cases in Shakespeare, Defoe, Chaucer and the King James Bible where "whom" is used "incorrectly" by modern standards

- Howard Lasnik and Nicholas Sobin describe whom as "It is commonly assumed that the English interrogative/relative pronoun whom is parallel to him and them in manifesting objective pronominal Case...Whom in modern English derives from a set of extra-grammatical rules...[used to generate] products that have a 'prestige' status. Whom differs markedly from intuitions about the use of personal pronouns. http://ling.umd.edu/~lasnik/ and the presentation http://academics.utep.edu/Portals/878/papers/whom_paper_vanc...

- Edward Sapir dedicated significant studies to the obsoletion of whom. In "Language: Intro to Study Speech" he remarks: "It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying "Whom did you see!" By that time the 'whom' will be as delightfully archaic as the Elizabethan 'his' for 'its.' No logical or historical argument will avail to save this hapless 'whom'"

- Thurber provided this example: "A common rule for determining whether 'who' or 'whom' is right is to substitute 'she' for 'who', and 'her' for 'whom', and see which sounds better. Take the sentence, 'He met a woman who they said was an actress'. Now if 'who' is correct then 'she' can be used in its place...'He met a woman she they said was an actress'.

- Chomsky wrote that similar non-grammatical structures that only exist in grammar books are: "...a violation of natural law. In fact, a good deal of what's taught is taught because it's wrong. You don't have to teach people their native language because it grows in their minds, but if you want people to say, "He and I were here" and not "Him and me were here," then you have to teach them because it's probably wrong.

- Mair notes that: "whom is moribund as an element of the core grammar of English, but is very much alive as a style marker whose correct use is acquired in the educational system [, where it is taught]. [The use of whom] is highly restricted, but rather than disappear entirely, the form is likely to remain in use for some time to come because of its over prestige in writing."

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