| Advisory Notices: UFS does not sponsor this page or anything about it. There is absolutely no association of any kind between this page and UFS. UFS would want no part of this page and doubtless would just as soon never hear anything about it being a manifestation of the doctrine of fair use. This page exists solely for the purpose of teaching copyright law to law students. |
| This page requires HTML 4 (iframes) and should be viewed with Firefox, Mozilla, NS 6.1+ or EI 5+. The iframing works best at screen width 800 (set Windows Display Properties Settings at 800 x 600). |
| Any similarity between this page and the Dilbert Hack Page is purely by way of homage: When that page was created in January 1996 iframes were not yet part of HTML. Therefore the present iframing could not have been implemented for viewers. Also, the Dilbert Hack Page used an ingenious Perl script to strip the current Dilbert gif out of the rest of the code on the iframed page. This page just iframes the whole page on which the gif appears and leaves it for you to scroll the page for convenient viewing, which is a good enough hack for professorial-educational-fair use in teaching students about putative derivative works. |
First, we iframe the content to bait the mousetrap. The frame source is the UFS official Dilbert site.
Then we think up metatagging at least as good as that of UFS. Here is theirs, as you can see by using the right click for Frame Source: "<meta NAME="keywords" CONTENT="official dilbert website, dilbert comic strip, scott adams, daily dilbert strip, dilbert archive, dilbert merchandise, dogberts new ruling class, dnrc, dogberts newsletter, dilbert newsletter, mental workout problem, List of the Day, faq, frequently asked questions, the boss, dogbert, catbert, ratbert, wally, alice, asok, united feature syndicate">. That's bait too. (I have left the metatags out of the code for this page. Since this is your homework, we don't need no stinkin' metatags to get a search engine to bring you to this Web page. But the notional business model would need them.)
Next, we put in a JS to reset the page on unload, as in the commercial examples in the table near the end of the Mousetrapping 2 page. That sets the mousetrap to keep the viewer on this page. (Alternatively, in the other scheme you shuffle the user among a series of pages on unload.)
Of course. we can't forget the framing content. That was the whole point of the exercise. Say, just for the sake of discussion, we (notionally) offer to sell overstocks and distressed merchandise of licensed Dilbert and Snoopy products.
All right. Is there any copyright violation here? Any other IP or trade regulation violation? What counterclaims, if any, would be available if UFS sued? Is there any plausible market that it might notionally be attempting to monopolize? Anything else?
[Return to discussion of Mousetrapping.]
How do we do this?