Not that you needed one, but here’s one more reason to hate Ted Rall: he thinks the fair use doctrine is a “canard.” Apparently, he’s having a private cat fight with David Horowitz, who profiled his idiocy along with that of many other left wing loons. Of this Rall says:

The very notion of this website, which reads a lot like those anti-abortion websites that listed abortion doctors whom the groups wanted to see assassinated, ought to be illegal.

Note the weasel words “reads like.” Does Horowitz’s site “read like” the anti-abortion web sites that list abortion doctors? Sure. For one thing, both are generally written in English, as opposed to, say Hindi-Urdu. For another, both identify individuals they don’t like and make truthful but unflattering statements about them. And both generally use HTML.

On the other hand, there are also some key differences between Horowitz’s site and the anti-abortion sites to which Rall refers. For one thing, the anti-abortion sites are generally about abortion, while Horowitz’s is about other stuff. For another, the abortion sites talk about guys they’d like to see assassinated, while Horowitz’s does not. Details. All that matters to Ted is that both piss Ted Rall off, so both should be illegal.

I will grant Rall one thing. Unlike most of his fellow liberals, who fail to grasp that there is any difference at all between the law and their own personal preferences, Rall does concede that his unconstitutional ideas of what ought to be run afoul of that pesky First Amendment stands in the way of what most Americans think the law ought to be and what America-hating idiots like Rall think it ought to be. So instead he resorts to Plan B, which is not unlike the crap a deranged female it’s-that-time-of-the-month-365-days-a-year blogger tried on me a few weeks back. Basically, it goes like this: someone pisses you off over something you know full well they had every right to do, so rather than going after them for that, find some kind of “gotcha” you theoretically can go after. In the case of the deranged blogger, whom I’ll dub “Sunshine,” the source of her anger was clear: I had insulted her. While she is indeed an idiot, presumably she’s not a big enough idiot to think she can go after me for that, so instead she cooked up some theory about how I had supposedly “threatened” her and threatened to cry to my blog host or even my ISP about it. Obviously, she didn’t do a very good job faking the threat. If she had truly been threatened, her first reaction would have been to contact the authorities, not to blog about my alleged “mistake.” I don’t know or care if she ever actually tried contacting my ISP, as I know full well what they would have done, which is nothing.

This time, it’s Teddy’s turn. His phony offense? Copyright! That’s right, copyright. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Horowitz probably posted a collection of Rall’s most offensive, America-hating cartoons, right?” Wrong, it was a photo. “OK,” you say. “So it was a photo. Surely it was some fancy work of art, something with a genuine commercial value that would be undermined by some blogger copying it from Rall’s site and posting it on his own. Well, I can’t answer that one for sure because apparently Horowitz caved in to Rall’s bullying and posted a much less flattering public domain photo instead. But based on Rall’s incoherent rambling about the fancy photos on his own site, I can only surmise that the “stolen” photo was this one:

I leave it to you, the reader, to decide for yourself what a huge commercial value that photo had, and how Horowitz’s innocent copying undermined it in a way that my not so innocent hot-linking didn’t. Rall, however, was fit to be tied, and, stealing a page from John Kerry’s playbook, proudly announced having sent this moron letter to Horowitz, in the form of an email no less:

To: david@cspc.org
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:44 PM
Subject: URGENT: Cease and Desist Notice
Dear Mr. Horowitz:

It has come to my attention that you have, without obtaining written or other permission, posted a publicity photograph of myself, apparently copied from my website, to your site Discover the Network (http://www.discoverthenetwork.org). This photograph is copyrighted material. Your act violates U.S. Copyright Law, which provides for damages up to $150,000 plus attorney’s fees.

I therefore request that you take the following actions on or before 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, February 25, 2005:
1. Remove said photograph from your website.
2. Agree to remit the sum of $5,000.00 as payment for your unauthorized use of said photograph, with such payment via money order to be received within three (3) business days at my address in New York, New York.
3. Sign a notarized stipulation agreeing not to post my copyrighted material in the future.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this urgent matter.
Sincerely,
Ted Rall

Pay special attention to Rall’s request that Horowitz remove “said” photograph. “Said” is legalese for “I’m not a lawyer but I play one on TV.” So too is Rall’s incredible ignorance about the fair use doctrine, which Horowitz’s lawyer identified in his reply:

From: Manuel Klausner
Date: February 24, 2005 2:06:57 AM PST
To: Tedrall@aol.com
Subject: Re: URGENT: Cease and Desist Notice
Dear Mr. Rall,

I represent David Horowitz, and am writing to respond to your email below. I am informed that the “publicity photograph” was not copied from your website, contrary to your surmise. It appears to be in the public domain. If you dispute this, please promptly furnish me with a copy of your copyright registration.

Even if the photo is copyrighted, its use in FrontPageMagazine.com appears to qualify as a fair use. The nature and purpose of the use is news reporting and commentary in an Internet publication for nonprofit educational purposes. The very nature of a “publicity photo” suggests that it is ordinarily intended to be used without obtaining permission in advance. Moreover, it does not appear that the effect of the use would be to decrease the value of the photo, which appears to have been widely circulated in many sources. Accordingly, we believe a court would find this use of the photo to be “fair” under Section 107 of the Copyright Law.
Based on the foregoing reasons, your three requests are hereby rejected. We would be willing to consider any further information you care to provide, including a copy of any copyright registration.

Manuel S. Klausner

To which Rall brilliantly replied (not to the attorney by private correspondence, but right there on his blog, in front of [censored by ACLU] and everyone):

I don’t know if or where Manuel Klausner went to law school…

That would be New York University, a top ten law school which is currently ranked #5 in the nation. Rall’s ignorance of Klausner’s legal background is understandable, however, seeing as Klausner has been practicing law in California since before Rall was born. Rall, by contrast, has no legal education whatsoever.

…but I like to rely on the ever-useful Glamour Models website for legal advice. And Glamour Models (well, actually, an attorney who wrote a piece they posted for fashion photographers) has some interesting advice for Horowitz and other intellectual property thieves.

Translated: Rall read an article by David L. Amkraut, a veteran attorney, albeit one who has practiced less than half as long as Klausner has, and who does not represent anyone involved in Rall’s pissing match dispute. Amkraut’s article was aimed at photographers whose photos have real commercial value and are unlikely to be copied for reasons other than piracy. Typically, such (or, in Rallspeak, “said”) photographs work for magazines like Glamour and feature models even more Glamor(tm)ous than Ted Rall, and are therefore almost 100% commercial value and 0% news. Rall, who has little in the way of common sense and less in the way of legal knowledge, arbirarily chose to take and run with a general statement by one lawyer he doesn’t know rather than even consider listening to the more specific arguments of another lawyer whom he also doesn’t know.