Recognizing That Infringers Are Actually Promoters, Why Not Reward Them?
A few years ago, we suggested that the entertainment industry could learn a lot from something that USA Today founder Al Neuharth did in the early years of USA Today: recognizing that the “thieves” taking his product without paying for it were actually his best distributors and promoters. In this case, it really was thieves — college kids were stealing copies of USA Today. While Neuharth’s lawyers suggested suing, Neuharth, instead decided to hire them as distributors, recognizing that this is what they were really doing already. The same is quite often true with today’s “infringers.” Copyright law was really written for commercial infringement, and today because of its clumsy nature, it’s capturing and punishing people who are really the content’s best promoters and distributors. In many ways they should be rewarded rather than punished. And, it appears at least some businesses are trying to leverage that recognition. Jon Healey has the story of a product called Fotoglif that is targ
