FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for July 22, 2024

Highlights some of the absurdities of copyright law.

What’s a record industry, and what’s a CD?

I had a boss who told me that I should have been a lawyer, after I convinced him that I was only taking 2 days off when in reality I was taking a week. My logic was flawless.

On paper, this is brilliant.

I think if your read the fine print in the Microsoft End User Agreement, it says that if you use Word to write ANY document, it becomes the intellectual property of Microsoft.

Does anyone know when this edition of this strip was produced? I’m wondering if the artist got the idea from Rubin & Riehl, if they got their idea from this strip, or the similarities are coincidental.

To save you from searching, Rubin & Riehl are a music producer and a lawyer who started a project to use computers to generate every possible musical melody incorporating certain constraints of rhythm and range. Their goal was to point out that the number of such melodies is finite, and that similarities in songs are not necessarily due to plagiarism. I think there was also some talk about making it impossible to copyright new melodies by putting them all into the public domain. I don’t know what became of the project.

Most people, evidently including Jason,don’t know that you can’t copyright song titles.

I’m sure there are some pretty good and decent lawyers out there but it appears that the bad ones usually get the press. They’re the ones that spawn the great lawyer jokes that we come to love….and laugh! ;-p

Titles can’t be copyrighted.

Sounds like he’s gonna have a bunch of binary head bangers.

Young Jason may be a technical genius, but he should avoid practicing law. What he’s doing is akin to “copywriting” on individual letters. Maybe trademark them (that won’t fly, but hey, give it a try), but copywrite, nope.

Wal-Mart still sells CDs. Just not as much.

Its the pits I’m afraid but the zero’s and one’s are never manifestly represented as such in the process of decoding the CD into analog sound, nonetheless there’s a 0/1 % chance that Jason may get a nice letter in the post from Philip Glass’s lawyers, re: similarity to the work Einstein on the Beach

Further reasons to keep Jason out of marketing and law school.

Yes Andy, keep the kid out of law school because he’s full of terrible ideas. This is akin to an author suing other authors because he has a trademarked work includes the letters of the alphabet.

I get it – this is supposed to be a silly idea. But it’s so dumb that it’s just dumb.

it seems that Jason grew up to develop the copyright algorithm for youtube

That would be like writing a song consisting solely of the note C and then expecting royalties from every song that uses that note. Not gonna happen. Unless you get the lawsuit to the US Supreme Court and pay off the majority of the justices.

He was probably one of the lawyers that swindled thousands of A.T.$T. employees out of pension funds.

Maybe you should lock him in the basement.

he later changes his name to Bill G.

If those titles could be copyrighted, Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, and U2 would have words with Jason.