Re: BBS liability

The scienter distinction of patent/copyright refers to the knowledge of the protected object at the time of independent creation of the accused object, not the knowledge of infringing acts. If the BBS operator created the Playboy files from scratch without access to Playboy's images, then no infringement (not a likely scenario). This is known as independent creation. By contrast, an independent invention can nonetheless infringe a patent.

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Phil Albert, full-time patent attorney and philosopher, part-time car thief
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