[A2k] Copyright Law Used to Shut Down Site

[Jeff Williams]

All,

  Is this in the offing in US Copyright Law cases and
court rulings?

How can a whole website be closed down that
parodied a coal industry ad campaign as a form of
protest after removing the claimed Copywritten offending
content?  Is decent in Australia now deemed illegal?
Given this incident, it would seem so...

"The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian mining
industry group has used copyright laws to close a website that
parodied a coal industry ad campaign. A group known as
Rising Tide created the website using the slogan "Rising sea levels:
brought to you by mining" in response to the mining industry's slogan of

"Life: brought to you by mining". The mining industry claimed that the
"content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when
Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the
mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright
law in order to stifle dissent?"

See:
 http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/industry-closes-anticoal-website/2007/03/04/1172943275688.html

and
 http://www.miningnsw.com.au/climate.php
 http://www.nswmining.com.au/index.html

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
   Abraham Lincoln

"Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is
very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt

"If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B;
liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
United States v. Carroll Towing  (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
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