Thursday, November 27, 2003

Interesting idea, pointless implementation.

Driver gets stopped by the police (for careless driving, improper registration, and expired tags) in Missouri, and is asked for his license. Instead of the license, he happily gives them a computer printout which explains that he has copyrighted his name and that anyone who wrote down his name without his permission would get sued, and that he has determined the damages to be a minimum of $500,000 per instance that his name appeared in official documents. Police officers call for backup and for their shift supervisor, who told the driver that he'd have to contact the city attorney's office.

He must have thought it was a great get-rich scheme: copyright his name, break some sort of traffic offense so the police would write down his name, and then sue and get rich.

Any possible problems? Well, the article points out that while you are free to copyright your name, "fair use" doctrines allow others to write down the name so long as they aren't making money as a result. I'd suggest that he has implicitly given permission for the state to use his name when he got a driver's license with that name. I'd also suggest that he's an idiot, but perhaps that's pretty apparent.

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