We've noted how copyright gets weird when you realize that everything that computers do is about making copies, and it can lead to some bizarre lawsuits. Eric Johnson points us to a writeup by Eugene Volokh of an attempt by a lawyer (of course) named Kenneth Stern, who argued that forwarding a single 23-word sentence that he had sent out to a listserv email list, constituted copyright infringement. As Johnson notes, the full sentence, at 150 characters, was just slightly larger than a Twitter message:

Has anyone had a problem with White, Zuckerman . . . cpas including their economist employee Venita McMorris over billing or trying to churn the file?

Now, the reason we can be comfortable reposting that, without fear of dealing with a copyright infringement lawsuit from Kenneth Stern is because the court shot down the lawsuit, noting both that the sentence was not covered by copyright, and even if it were, forwarding it to a mailing list would be fair use. Oh, and the court didn't just shoot it down. It said that Stern's lawsuit was frivolous... to the point of saying that he may need to pay attorney's fees for the people he sued.

Plaintiff asserts that he holds a valid copyright and that Defendants' acts -- copying and distributing his listserv post -- constituted both copyright infringement and contributory infringement....

[T]he copyrightability of a very short textual work -- be it word, phrase, sentence, or stanza -- depends on the presence of creativity. The opening sentence of a poem may contain sufficient creativity to warrant copyright protection whereas a more prosaic sentence of similar length may not. For instance, the opening stanza/sentence of the poem Jabberwocky contains, coincidentally, the same number of words -- 23 -- as Plaintiff's listserv post: " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe." The utter creativity of this "greatest of all nonsense poems in English" prompted one court to suggest that even its first line would be entitled to copyright protection.

Plaintiff’s listserv post, in contrast, displays no creativity whatsoever -- its content is dictated solely by functional considerations. Plaintiff merely requested factual information: whether anyone on the listserv had a bad experience with a certain forensic accounting firm -- and one employee in particular -- regarding overbilling and the churning of client files. His single sentence conveys precisely this idea and no more. As Plaintiff's expression of his idea is indistinguishable from the idea itself, it is not entitled to copyright protection....

Separately, the fair use argument strikes me as quite interesting in a few ways as well. For example, in discussing the four prongs, the court finds that the forwarding of the email (which was sent to the law firm that Stern was asking about) was "transformative." Now, we often hear from copyright defenders who claim that to be transformative, you have to totally change the work itself, but the court explains that's not the case:

Defendants' use of Plaintiff’s sentence is highly transformative. Plaintiff's listserv post sought specific information about a forensic accounting firm's questionable business tactics. Defendants did not seek any information at all; their purpose was to alert the company about Plaintiff's post. By forwarding the post in e-mails, they conveyed the fact of the post rather than its underlying message. Defendants' e-mails thus had a substantially different purpose than the post itself, a fact which weighs heavily in favor of fair use.

We've seen some folks claim in the comments that Section 230 safe harbors go away if the person or company is involved in forwarding or posting the material of others -- but courts have repeatedly held otherwise. Now we've got yet another such case, that actually has pretty a pretty similar story line to some previous lawsuits. Basically a guy forwarded an email to a mailing list, which someone claimed was defamatory -- and they sued the guy who forwarded the email. But, once again, a court has found that the mere act of forwarding the email does not take away section 230 protections. The fact that the guy added a brief intro to the email also didn't change this -- though, the content of that intro could be reviewed for defamation (the court found there was none), since that was actually written by the guy.

Once again, this is exactly how Section 230 should act. It's designed to make sure liability gets applied to the right party -- the one actually making (for example) the defamatory remarks. Merely passing along what someone said shouldn't have the liability passed on to you as well, and that's exactly what the court found.

At times, the tech geeks at the NY Times show that they understand what it takes to be a modern online newspaper. At other times... it makes you wonder. Valleywag notes that when the New York Times shut down the International Herald Tribune, which reprinted many nytimes.com stories at their IHT.com website, the NYT pointed every IHT link to a single landing page, rather than properly forwarding them to the proper stories at the NY Times -- effectively breaking tons of useful links online (including plenty right here on Techdirt). For a company that was just among those complaining that Google didn't rank its stories high enough, perhaps the powers that be at the NY Times should take a look at its own policies before whining to Google.