Re: Summers v Tice (and Copyright?)

On Thu, Aug 03, 2000, S. Martin Keleti <keleti[_at_]manifesto.com> wrote:
>
> On 08/02/2000, Liane Lucietta <lrlucietta[_at_]hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > In my view, it is inappropriate to bring a tort law concept into a
> > copyright infringement suit. Tort law grew out of the industrial
> > revolution, when large numbers of factory workers started getting
> > mangled in machinery. Bodily injury is involved in all the tort
> > cases with which I'm familiar, where the plaintiff is relieved of
> > the burden of proving causation.
>
> Is "tort law" being used synonymously with "personal injury law" or
> "negligence" in this context? It's always been my understanding
> that copyright infringement is a tort, whether under common law or
> by statute. Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort. I
> thought torts were around long before the industrial revolution:
> trespass to land, trespass to chattels, defamation, malicious
> prosecution, and other torts have nothing to do with persons being
> mangled.

This is correct. Tort law, in the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, far pre-dates the Industrial Revolution. It also far predates any other kind of law, including criminal law. The law of the Angles and the Saxons (and most Germanic tribes as well) in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire was based almost exclusively on tort law and the concept of wergild or man-price. Injuries to people or objects were assigned a price, to be varied according to circumstances. If you, say, killed someone, you had to pay his family that person's man-price. This price was generally more than anyone could afford, so involuntary servitude generally followed. Of course, as a slave, you could be killed with impunity.

Note the above is a broad generalization. There were many variations across regions and across time. The main point is that, yes, tort law is ancient.

On the other hand, most of the more nebulous, negligence based torts did arise in the last 200 years, generally in response to the Industrial Revolution. Nothing makes new laws like thousands of people dying needlessly.

-David Hale
 <dhale[_at_]aggt.com> Received on Fri Aug 04 2000 - 13:11:14 GMT