Common sense ruling...
...now punish him for bringing the law and lawyers in general into disrepute.
Hey, if we hanged all the lawyers that did that, the world would be a far better place for everybody (including all reasonable lawyers).
A lawyer's email was not creative enough to be protected by copyright laws, a US court has ruled. The critical email had been forwarded outside of an email group without the consent of author Kenneth Stern, who then sued the person who forwarded the message for breach of copyright. Stern's email lacked originality and a …
but the second one is never going to fly. Lawyers in the US are already in so much disrepute it isn't possible to bring any more upon them.
Which means that if you bring suite on both counts, another good lawyer will probably get him off on the first count as well.
"The judge ... asked for more details of the fees incurred by the Weinsteins before settling on the figure for which Stern will be liable."
If that was me, I'd put in costs for kleenex for wiping away the tears of laughter, administrative costs of reading Stern's communications, wear and tear caused on pens used for replying and wear caused on phones used to call him and all sorts of other random junk. When Dubious Lawsuits Go Bad And Deservedly Bankrupt The Idiot.
I thought the US subscribed to the Berne Convention, meaning that the copyright exists as the work is created, without any registration or other forms of government intervention.
Why would that guy have requested a copyright certificate? Why does the US government even issue copyright certificate as they are - re the Berne convention - without value.
It also allows for additional damages, I suppose on the principle that you can't argue that you didn't know it had been copyrighted.
There's a couple of quirks of US Copyright Law-- "fair use" is an important one--but every country has a few quirks. The Berne Convention is a minimum.
On this particular legal point, if the lawyer had written his comment as a limerick, he would have been OK.