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KaVir writes:
A straw man doesn't necessarily involve exaggeration or caricature; it's a fairly broad term. It's when you when you pick an argument to defeat other than the one that your opponent actually made. This may involve distorting your opponents argument as you describe, or it may be substituting another that sounds close enough but is sufficiently different as to lead to a different conclusion.
or
for instance. I have seen a few definitions similar to yours, but believe them to be a mistake of incorporating the Slippery Slope and/or reductio ad absurdem, the key of both of those being extension/caricature. The Straw Man's key element is misdirection or bait and switch, ie "This is what you said, but I'll respond to that instead."
I will need to look that up: whether Fair Use is technically "no, I'm not infringing because this is acceptable" or "yes, I'm infringing on your rights, but there's no way for you to enforce them against me in this case."
I do believe that limited rights to use material can be given without a signed contract, if that's what you mean. Everything is generally shades of gray, granted, but that doesn't mean that decisions can't be clearcut in the majority of cases.
I don't think anyone has equated Traithe and Vryce. Many of the posters have gone out of their way to contrast the two. They WERE lumped into the same broad category of copyright infringers, with associated loaded words ("thief", etc.) But the people leaning towards the pro-fanfiction side of the fence haven't simply asked for the loaded words to be dropped; the main discussion has revolved around the acts themselves.
I don't think the argument that tolerating the use of IP without permission could be generally harmful to the community can be dismissed out of hand. DIKU comes with a license. Every copy of LOTR comes with a license. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to ask why the community aggressively defends the DIKU license but not the LOTR license.
I don't necessarily think that you personally are being inconsistent in the cases you pick to crusade on: you consistently pick cases where the IP owner's stated wishes are being violated, even if those wishes were ineffectively codified into the written license (the famous "profit" clause applied to "just for expenses" donations, the quite legal compensation of coders to work on DIKU, etc.)
Now, if you were to come out and say (as I thought you had in your initial summary of Traithe's arguments) that violating the written license was actually acceptable for LOTR but not DIKU, then that would be inconsistent (unless you simply apply the "author's level of public displeasure" criterion totally across the board, in which case I would think that you're wrong but not inconsistent).
Stilton
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