Tweets of the Day, This Is Beautifully Vicious Trolling edition.

I mean, it’s art. Art of the sort that you would see from an angel that stubbornly still insisted that it had merely been exiled from Heaven, not Fallen from it.

Background here. Short version: various bad-assholes out there have worked out method where they steal art without permission and offer t-shirts and whatnot with the stolen art on it. One of the techniques that they use is looking for posts that go Oh, man, I wish I could get a print of this! or suchlike.

Well, some good-assholes out there have noticed this technique, and now they’re going around making pictures that say stuff like the above and then asking people to respond with Oh, man, I wish I could get a print of this! And that’s when the magic happens. Hey: live by the automatic scrape, die by it. Because right now a few of Disney’s lawyers are sitting around a table and asking themselves whether they feel peckish enough to go hunting. I mean, sure, it’s probably not worth it in terms of pure calories, but there’s more to life than sheer need.

7 thoughts on “Tweets of the Day, This Is Beautifully Vicious Trolling edition.”

  1. From what I understand, Disney pretty much has to go after this. A blatant copyright violation like this that gets ignored opens the door to allowing others to do the same thing. And this image is about as blatant about being a copyright violation as you can get.

    On the other hand, Disney can start with a Cease and Desist, which would keep Disney’s legal costs down… assuming the the image pirates are smart enough to remove the offered merchandise (which is the smart move to make, as no one wants to actually buy this shirt).

    There’s also the complication that the people who make these shirts might not be located in a country with good international copyright protections. That will complicate matters for The Mouse.

    1. Ken White of Popehat (and other lawyers) say this “you must go after every potential infringement” is not true. I don’t pretend to know how right (or wrong) they are.

  3. I want to be clear up front that I don’t disapprove of this at all, but hunting with bait is usually illegal.

    1. The equivalent of “hunting with bait” would probably be entrapment. But since Disney isn’t the company that set the bait, it can’t be that. This is more akin to convincing a drug dealer to arrange his deal on the same radio channels that the cops use.

Comments are closed.