****Sorry guys, I have to weigh on on the copyright issue ****
Justa,
You really sound like Carl Johnson, of Infrastructure, when you talk about these copyright issues (which is a compliment, BTW--I like his stuff). But I think you may be (emphasize "may" here) going a little too far.
Let me first qualify this by saying that I did not read the original post, so don't know in what detail Paul went. Certainly if he quoted verbatim and extensively, it is a copyright infringement. But it doesn't seem to me that it is a copyright infringement if he basically just summarized Brinker's view, although timing is admittedly an issue. That is, if he heard on a hot line that Brinker was issuing a "sell", and then reported it over SI, then an infringement occurs. If he gets a newsletter, and then a week or two later, says "Brinker said to sell" (or "buy", whatever), then I'm not so sure. At some point the argument seems to me to dissolve into nonsense, which is why copyright law is so amenable to varying interpretations.
You gave the example of Barrons, television and radio as being somehow fair game for people to quote from. Why should they be exempt? If you are being consistent, then anyone saying, for example, that Barrons had a great article on UTEK saying "buy it now and hold it forever" would be violating Barrons' and their readers' rights. On television, someone sponsors a show, someone else makes it, they all have a financial interest in it--if someone wants to know what was said on the show, they can damn well watch it (more viewers = more points = more advertising revenue for the station/network), rather than hear about it from someone else. Surely these things get to be silly at some point, though defining the precise point is as we all know at best difficult, and impossible in the abstract.
If I were Brinker--which I'm obviously not--I wouldn't mind the free publicity that I get when people summarize my views occasionally over the net. This creates an air of legitimacy and "sageness" for him; if his calls turn out to be right, he probably will get more subscribers. Any investor worth his/her salt won't simply take the words of posts on the Web as their investment guide. If they think Brinker has indeed something to say, they will subscribe because they want to know his reasoning, they want better timing, they want to know what else he is touting or slamming.
You will probably say that it is up to Brinker to choose when and how to market his newsletter, and that is certainly correct. But as a previous poster said, he is a big boy, he knows about SI, and could find out easily enough if people were quoting him without his permission, and would do what Johnson did on another thread (I forget which one) if he didn't want it to happen--he would publicly protest on thread, and get the Webmistress to remove the offending post. |
