Friday, August 24, 2007

Stuart Pivar - classic crackpot

Amanda at Pandagon reports that P.Z. Meyers is being sued by classic crackpot Stuart Pivar, because Meyers harshly criticized Pivar. Based on the complaint, available from Majikthese what seems to bug Pivar the most is that Meyers called him a "classic crackpot." Crackpots really hate to be called crackpots.

The crackpot's complaint was filed in New York’s Southern District Court. I certainly hope that Judge Lewis Kaplan gets that case - he's not one to mince words, as I found out in the strange case of Edward Einhorn v Mergatroyd Productions

No doubt Edward Einhorn HOPES that this case will get some kind of traction, since he has accused me online of defaming him, by merely writing about Einhorn v. Mergatroyd, as well as claiming that I was trying to "villify him". Villians always hate it when you call them villians. And pretty much every member of the Dramatists Guild, not to mention plenty of non-theatre folk, considers what Einhorn did to be villanous, and an abuse of the US legal system. But people can make up their own minds by reading my account of the case, which politely includes the URL of Einhorn's own laughable argument in favor of a director's copyright. Last time I looked, he had not extended me the same courtesy.

Einhorn's case against us should have been thrown out of court, since the basis of his lawsuit was an unauthorized derivative copyright registration of his absurd "blocking and choreography" script on my play TAM LIN. I expect the US Copyright Office to issue an official cancellation of Einhorn's travesty any day now.

But as both Einhorn and Pivar demonstrate, far too many people believe that free speech, in the form of expressing an opinion about another person, is an actionable offense, if the object of the opinion doesn't like the expressed opinion. Clearly more needs to be done to teach people about the meaning of the First Amendment.

Surely this Pivar case will be laughed out of court, along with Bill O'Reilly's case against Al Franken also tried in the Southern District Court of NY.