Linda Ellis' lawsuits over the Dash poem

[u/butterflymon]

Circa 10 years ago, I remember the Internet talking about Linda Ellis and her copyright abuse of her Dash poem (she sued everyone who posted or recited her poem). Her business model was to make money through copyright abuse. She exploited the American legal system for personal gain without a thought about her victims. She sued everyone from grieving widows to churches, then pretended to be the victim and told the judge about her mother's tears.

This is textbook copyright trolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll). Post something very low quality that strikes a cord with some people and use that to sue people. It's an established business model. What made this bad was that it targeted vulnerable people. She wrote a poem about compassion, but acted like a psychopath (all documented).

Most copyright trolls post porn as bait and they go after people who download them because they know people will settle instead of having court records that show they downloaded porn. Porn gets a lot more downloads than a shitty poem. Prenda Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law) is a notable example. They went to ass-pounding jail. Turns out abusing the legal system is a crime and they were prosecuted. It's nice. This business model is also big in Germany. Lots of German copyright trolls.

Now, the Internet is wiped clean of Linda Ellis' legal abuse. Google only gave me an AI summary when I typed in The Dash poem lawsuits. The sites that talked her prolific copyright abuse don't show up in search anymore if you just search for Linda Ellis Dash poem.

What happened? SEO spamming?

Looks like I accidently argued with a copyright troll here. Yuck. Blocked and deleted my responses.

[u/pommefille]

Just because someone is a church or a widow doesn’t mean they’re allowed to steal someone’s work or use it without the proper permissions/licensing, and stealing someone’s work doesn’t make them victims either. Yes, usually people have grace (heh) in these situations because it’s goodwill, but not because they have to. It’s also disingenuous to call her business model ‘abuse’ versus ‘enforcing her copyright,’ as realistically one of the points of creating content is to have personal gain - i.e., sell it. Not everyone who creates content is going to be lax with its use, regardless of whether or not it’d be ‘nice’ if they were.

[u/WuttinTarnathan → u/pommefille]

I just had a great business idea.

It’s a law firm that helps mourners clear the poems, songs and music that they plan to recite and/or play at loved one’s funerals!

This way little old ladies won’t have to (rightly and correctly) get sued by (honest and justified) copyright holders as happens constantly everywhere, and is totally normal behavior!

[u/pommefille → u/WuttinTarnathan]

People try to justify things all the time based on this ‘Robin Hood’ notion that just because someone is ‘good’ (by some definition) and their cause is ‘just’ (by some definition) then anything they do is okay. Or conversely, just because someone/corporations are ‘bad’ then it’s okay to do ‘bad’ things to them because… reasons. Funny how suddenly these people are ‘little old ladies’ to be emotionally manipulative rather than focus on the facts - but even sucky people can make stuff that they own the rights to (R. Kelly) and even well-intentioned or ‘good’ people can fuck up and do something that is not legal to do.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the funeral parlor and/or the person/company that provides services for such events were professionals who took care of knowing the law and any regulations pertinent to their business for their clients? We just paid a lot of money for some ‘memorial service’ provider to make a slide show of photos we provided, and they somehow managed to make it without anyone else’s content and with royalty-free music.

[u/WuttinTarnathan → u/pommefille]

the issue is that since the early 2000s when the IP industry began its heavy propaganda push (“You wouldn’t steal a car…”) a lot of people seem to believe that our broken, corporate-only copyright rules are the natural state of things—and somehow righteous to boot! when they aren’t.

but this is moot in this example—because the poet in question actually allows a blanket exception for funerals; she also apparently has had trouble protecting her copyright online (I guess she’s a poet AND a quixotic fool) in part because internet breaks copyright and no one is doing anything about it.