Romney campaign apparently violates copyright law (ping lawyers)

[Alan]

Both may have been cribbed from online code examples.

There has to be prior art that predates both sites... This is just silly.

I searched for "After you’ve saved your credit card and phone number in your" (in quotation marks) to return results between the 1st of January, 2000, and the beginning of this month. It didn't return anything suggesting that was the case.

 

[Puppycow]

There has to be prior art that predates both sites... This is just silly.

Prior art is a patent term. This is about copyright law, which is a somewhat different thing.

I don't think one can patent a website, but copyright protection does apply, hence the "all rights reserved" thingy.

 

[zeggman]

It's debatable whether the original was a grammatical error in any case. Yes, in American English the convention is to put a comma inside the quotation marks, but that could cause confusion in this case: does one text the comma too, or only the numerals? I think it's a stupid convention myself. I prefer the British convention, and I often use it too.

Off topic, but I agree with you. I always put the comma outside the quotes when it's a single word, as here. I frequently do it with embedded sentences as well. I wasn't aware that it was the British convention, and frankly I'm a little disappointed to find I'm following an older tradition rather than blazing a new one.

 

[Puppycow]

I searched for "After you’ve saved your credit card and phone number in your" (in quotation marks) to return results between the 1st of January, 2000, and the beginning of this month. It didn't return anything suggesting that was the case.

Yeah, this theory is easily testable by Google. If there's another website out there with the same or similar content, Google will find it.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

It's a simple mistake really. They were only trying to copy and paste parts of the Obama platform. . . .

 

[elbe]

Yeah, this theory is easily testable by Google. If there's another website out there with the same or similar content, Google will find it.

Not necessarily, there are ways to prevent Google from indexing a page, but it doesn't help my guess any. I guess I can imagine a developer being told to do something like Obama's (assuming his came first) but nothing more specific to help differentiate them.

 

[Upchurch]

Not necessarily, there are ways to prevent Google from indexing a page, but it doesn't help my guess any.

And you would want Google to index your contribution page. robot.txt and rel="nofollow" are for things like personal profile pages and administration pages/links.

I guess I can imagine a developer being told to do something like Obama's (assuming his came first) but nothing more specific to help differentiate them.

Do you work at my office? You just almost gave my job description, in a broad sense. If you had said, "and slap some ads on the page", I would have been certain.

 

[elbe]

And you would want Google to index your contribution page. robot.txt and rel="nofollow" are for things like personal profile pages and administration pages/links.

I can sort of imagine situations where you might want to prevent indexing of the actual donation page and instead try to keep traffic going through a main page of sorts.

Do you work at my office? You just almost gave my job description, in a broad sense. If you had said, "and slap some ads on the page", I would have been certain.

My office seems to involve a lot of random upgrading (let's turn that vb.net code into c#, and that vb6 code into SQL stored procs!).

 

[SezMe]

As a website developer, copying code from others is a long held tradition. Its how most of us learn how to code in the first place. Shared knowledge* is the entire point of the Internet.

Really. This is not even a deal.


*and porn

... Porn ... and shared knowledge ....

I just thought I'd put the emphasis where it belongs.

 

[Ziggurat]

Could Obama sue the Romney campaign over this? Should he?

I can't imagine how they could claim damages on something like this. The best I could imagine a suit could achieve is forcing the Romney campaign to change it, but they already did, so it's moot. A lawsuit over this after it's already been changed would probably not be looked upon favorably by voters or by the courts.