The states and inputs that lawyers have to deal with tend to much more vague and imprecise (which is expected if you're dealing with human behavior and not text or some other encodeable input) and so have to rely on inherently ambiguous phrases like "reasonable" and "without undue delay."

- Liebeck initially only requested McDonald's cover the medical fees from going into shock and having 3rd degree burns over her lower body (including genitalia), which McDonald's refused and only offered $800.

- McDonald's had received hundreds of reports of the coffee scalding people.

- Liebeck didn't get the multi-million dollar payout because the judge reduced it 640k, trebled the compensatory damages, which is incredibly normal for punitives.

This is absolutely incorrect. Independent creation is a complete defense to copyright infringement. Funny enough, Learned Hand gives a near identical example to highlight the opposite conclusion ("if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, he would be an 'author,' and, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats's").

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852158

Points: 5

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