Symantec Has No Sense Of Humor

from the it-sounds-like-some-lawyers-need-a-personality dept

You may remember a month ago a post about a "joke of the day" virus warning that told people to remove AOL.exe from their computers. At the time a bunch of less-than-clueful folks took it seriously and deleted their AOL program. Anyway, the original joke was written by Ray Owens, and he added a copyright to the bottom of it. Symantec put the joke on their site, describing it as a hoax. However, they included the entire message - without attributing it to Owens, or the joke of the day site. He called them and jokingly said he was going to sue them for $1 million. All he really wanted was a link back to the site. Symantec told him they could use it under "Fair Use Doctrine", which simply isn't true. The article points out that this is the same company that sued Network Associates over 30 lines of copyrighted code for $100 million. They should have just said it was fair use...