www.cbs.com
In the West we say that we believe in protection of intellectual property rights. Here we see that drawing the boundary between my intellectual property rights and those of CBS can be a challenge.
It seems that, by submitting our e-mail to our friends at CBS, we would have automatically assigned copyright of OUR e-mail to THEIR network. We decided to submit it anyway, but not until we were through using it for other intended purposes and had prepared a paraphrase (see below) which we could post on our web site. You can�t copyright an idea and a carefully-done paraphrase doesn�t infringe on copyright.
My friends at CBS may now own the copyright to that magnificent e-mail which I so skillfully composed. The value of their stock may be boosted by ten or fifteen percent as a result.
But they don�t own the paraphrase.
THE CULT OF CBS
Many readers may not be aware that, in addition to being a business entity, CBS is also a religious cult. The object of their devotion is a giant eyeball. For our amusement, we imagine that, because of their predatory business practices, CBS headquarters is becoming more and more like an isolated armed compound, sort of like the Branch Davidians.
We envisage Mr. Dan Rather stockpiling water and canned goods behind the anchor desk. At a TV station the anchor desk is the equivalent of the altar in a Catholic church.
We wonder if there�s is a possibility that the FBI anti-cult unit will soon be surrounding the CBS news building. Imagine the ratings for CBS if Mr. Rather were to himself one day be the main reporter for the story of his own final climatic confrontation with the feds!
Imagination aside, Mr. Rather suffered real embarrassment in the 2004 election campaign when some alleged 1970�s documents turned out to have word processor formatting.
So we though perhaps some of his friends might like to buy him a used typewriter.
That was what prompted our e-mail to CBS. It happened we had an old Smith-Corona, which could be used to create facsimile letters and other documents that would look as if they were from the period of approximately 1973-1990. Actually, we supposed what Mr. Rather might really have needed was an assortment of typewriters. It might be suspicious if all his purported old letters and other documents were typed on the same machine. But we thought our old Smith-Corona would have been a good start on the typewriter collection he might have liked to have.
CONTINUE