On Tue, 9 Dec 1997, Wing Wong wrote:

As far as not making money on it reducing the incentive to sue, I have to
differ on John's stand there. If I held a copyright on an image or a key

You get less damages if the person did not make money off it.  Given the
difficulties of lawsuits, lower damages reduce the profitability of a
lawsuit.  Of course, other things do come into play.

quality of acting in the courtroom, but in my humble opinion, free
distribution in no way detracts or reduces the incentive to sue. This however,
is dependent on a case by case basis.

It legally reduces your damages.
 

An added note on the sueing or not sueing bit. {Sorry for the misspellings..
^_^;} If the copyright holder DOESN'T defend their copyright when they know
people are infringing upon it, then that copyright holder is in a sense giving
up their right to enforce that right. Ie. If you are part of the Freedom

No, this applies to trademarks.  It doesn't matter if you let 50 million
copyright violations go by, it doesn't weaken your right to enforce that
right at all.  Trademarks, however, CAN be weakened or lost by failure to
enforce.

However. If you are NOT sued, then the true copyright holder will have a
harder time enforcing his or her copyright later on and collecting damages
since that person didn't enforce it the first time.

This is trademarks, not copyrights.  

There is a statute of limitations for copyrights, but that's a different
issue.  (3 years)


John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

"We're not grave robbing; we're grave bartering!"