No More Mr. Nice Guy

Thanks to the interactivity of the blog medium, I have discovered, once again, that one of my acerbic analyses of statements by the UnSettlement’s “associational plaintiffs” was … much too kind.

My August 26 post, “(Another) Glaring Misstatement By NWU,” http://freelancerights.blogspot.com/2005/08/another-glaring-misstatement-by-nwu.html, doesn’t have the half of it, a reader points out:

* NWU president Colby and former president Tasini give the wrong deadline for denying the defendants future use of your works. The claim deadline is September 30, and by inference that’s also the deadline for exercising the “takedown” option. Colby and Tasini confuse that with the deadline for objecting to or opting out from the settlement, which is September 12.

* Hilariously, the Colby-Tasini “important message” has false information about copyright registration fees. “It will lead anyone who relies on the information to fill out forms which will NOT register their works,” my reader-critic says. “As a result, it actually discourages registration. The registration fee is not $80 for 10 articles; it’s $30 for an unlimited number of articles published in the same 12-month period.”

* Finally, while I noted Colby-Tasini’s misstatement about statute-of-limitations law, I failed to add the point made here before: Under the “tolling” provision of class actions, separate actions by class members who opt out automatically would reach back at least to August 1997, or three years prior to the original filing of the class actions.

You can join the NWU for as little as $55 for six months. I, personally, would gladly pay Colby and Tasini to take the seminar "Copyright For Dummies" -- so long as they also promise to butt out of our class-action settlement, which they and their brethren associations have badly botched.