You can’t make this stuff up. The State of Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee sent a cease and desist letter to Justia a couple weeks ago claiming that a copy of the Oregon Revised Statutes that Justia had published online infringed on the State of Oregon’s copyright to the statutes. While Oregon conceded that the text of the law itself, it did assert that “the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section” were protected. This is a no-win situation. If the government doesn’t act like a business, people complain. When the government acts like a business, people complain.

Some legal experts see this as a copyright issue. Me? I see this as a tax issue. If the state collected a 10 cent royalty every time someone cited an Oregon law, just think what it will do for the Oregon budget. Cha-ching! Personally, I’m waiting for a YouTube video showing someone reading the Oregon Revised Statutes with leadlines and numbering.

When the RIAA sues some teenager for sharing music on Kazaa, it’s no longer news. After a while, the legal machinations gets old. Quick. So, when a media company gets sued for copyright infringement, that’s news. Or is it? While browsing through Pravda Studios, LLC v. Corbis Corporation et al., I came across a lot of the standard boilerplate:

This action is brought in response to a classic case of copyright infringement, specifically the unauthorized copying and commercial, for-profit use, copying, display and distribution of Plaintiff’s live action, motion picture, film footage entitled PRAVDA B-STOCK: SPAIN. 

This is a serious accusation. So, I had to find out what exactly Corbis had done to engage in a classic case of copyright infringement. To me, a classic case would involve Corbis ripping the video off someone else’s website and using it in their own marketing material. That’s classic. Instead, what really occurred was that Pravda allegedly submitted their video to Corbis, and Corbis allegedly lost it. Huh? That doesn’t sound like a classic case of copyright infringement to me.

Public Citizen blogged about a <a href=”http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2007/10/dont-publish-th.html”>cease-and-desist letter</a> that counsel for DirectBuy, Inc. had recently sent.  The letter states, “Please be aware that this letter is copyright by our law firm, and you are not authorized to republish this in any manner.  Use of this letter in a posting, in full or in part, will subject you to further legal causes of action.”  That’ll be an interesting law suit.  Any lawyers out there trading cease-and-desist letters on peer-to-peer file sharing networks?