Cosmos with Sagan, almost lawsuit

Very Interesting both in subject matter and the procedure followed in '81 v. what would be done today by a media outlet that received such accusations.

Fuller comes off as a piece of work, and I agree that the Hills' must not have had an easy time of dealing with the attention, although on some level it gave them an interesting type of life.
 
I note with interest that in his letter Mr. Fuller claimed there were people living in the scientific method. While I consider the scientific method strong and, used properly, to be a good thing, I was quite unaware that it had tenants until reading Mr. Fuller's misbegotten missive.........and worse, that Dr. Sagan was being accused of violating them!!!
 
I also should note that happens here from time to time!!!:D:D:D ETA: Tenets anyone???
 
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What a curious situation.
From the linked blog article
"If the story were fiction, Fuller would have a case. He would have to admit it was all made up to make any money off of this. Of course, Betty and Barney Hill fully believed they had been abducted by aliens. This was non-fiction to them. How Fuller felt about aliens, being that he had a financial interest in aliens and other paranormal creatures being real, we may never fully know.

This is equivalent to the case of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who wrote “The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail.” Baigent and Leigh sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement. However, the judge ruled that since their book was presented as fact, not fiction, they did not have a case."
 
If they ever consulted a lawyer, he/she probably advised them that they had no case, hence there was never a lawsuit. The people writing the angry letters threatening legal action were not lawyers, and it shows.

You can't copyright a historical event or real living people. You can copyright a work of non-fiction, but not the ideas in it, just the particular text. If they had copied whole sentences verbatim, or could be shown to be clearly plagiarizing the wording of the book maybe they would have a case. (IANAL either, but that's my understanding anyway.)

It's not as if one author writing a biography of a historical figure or account of a historical event then gains exclusive rights to that figure or event so that no-one else can write a biography of that person or history of the event. Nor does the figure themselves, if still living, have any exclusive right to such.
 
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