
Lawyer's Led Zeppelin Complaint Is a Work of Art (2014) - Tomte
http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2014/11/holy-crap-lawyers-led-zeppelin-complaint-is-a-work-of-art.html
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dgacmu
Ahh, another example of PDF retraction that puts an opaque black box over
something, yielding to the highly sophisticated "Highlight the text" attack.

sigh.

(To ensure clarity: The addresses of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul
Jones are included at the end of the complaint, and are improperly redacted.
One presumes this information isn't hard to come by, but if you're going to
try to redact it, you might as well do it right.)

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needcaffeine
What is the right way to redact a pdf?

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sschueller
The only true safe way is to print it, redact with a sharpie and scan it back
in. Not everyone is versed enogh with Adobe acrobat to do it the right way.

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jimbo1qaz
This will infect the printed (and scanned) document with patterns that allow
the government and/or police to identify your printer.

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ohithereyou
1) Irrelevant in the case of this court filing as the lawyer's name is
attached

2) In the case where this might be relevant there's a much easier way - export
PDF pages to high resolution PNG, edit to put a black box over the text, and
then combine the PNGs into a PDF again. This also has the benefit of stripping
any PDF metadata that may have been present in the original.

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loeg
FWIW, (2) doesn't strip any sort of steganographic watermark that might
already be embedded in the document, but invisible to the naked eye. Of
course, there's no reliable way to do that, anyway. And steganography could be
used in ways that are visible to the human eye (i.e., survives
printing/scanning) but still imperceptible with a single copy of the document.

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ohithereyou
You can strip the steganographic watermark by having somebody retype the
information from the document, but that doesn't defeat the barium meal.

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loeg
Not necessarily! Consider rearranged words or punctuation in different
versions of the document. You'd have to do something like type up a paraphrase
to get around that.

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davidad_
For those interested, the jury originally ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin, but
this year the 9th Circuit partially vacated the judgment and recommended a new
jury trial.
[https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab93a0e7-52e6...](https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab93a0e7-52e6-4275-a38c-878ad57bb2c2)

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chiph
Spirit's song _Taurus_ , which Led Zeppelin allegedly infringed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHLO_2_THg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHLO_2_THg)

There's some strong similarities there.

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amp108
> There's some strong similarities there.

In that they both use a descending chromatic line over a minor chord in the
harmony, a device that has been used in music for over 300 years.

Their differences are great, notably in the structural importance of the
figure (it happens in the middle of an ambient passage in _Taurus_ , but it's
the opening, passage of _Stairway_ ); in the fact that _Stairway_ uses a
melodic line on top of the chords, whereas _Taurus_ doesn't; and that
_Stairway_ uses it as a structural block for the whole song, and in _Taurus_ ,
it's only a moment in the middle of a larger section.

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gist
A mistake for an attorney to do this. While some courts might possibly think
it's 'cute' there is a higher risk that some will see it as a negative even if
they try not to be biased.

A court filing is not a job application or a college applications or trying to
get funding for your company. It's one shot. Not the type of risk that makes
any sense at all. Good for publicity though if that is the idea.

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eigenstuff
Did you read the article, though? The fonts used were actually specifically
designed for use in legal proceedings.

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pdpi
except for the Led Zeppelin-styled headings which were clearly not.

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aasasd
Note that it still uses double line-spacing, or something too close to that.
(The embedded Scribd butchers some formatting on mobile, but I think line
spacing is preserved.)

Double line spacing is wrong: it violates the principle of proximity, which is
a cornerstone of all visual design―because it simply describes how humans'
visual perception works. Practical formulation of the principle of proximity
is very simple: there should be obviously more space around an item than
inside of it, for the item to look like one integrated thing and not a bunch
of them. This works on all scales.

Double spacing makes it look like you can stick a line between two existing
ones. The lines don't stick together anymore, and this makes the paragraph
shaky, like it's falling apart.

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Stratoscope
Double spacing lets you handwrite comments and other markup between the lines.

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aklemm
I don't like some guys making millions while some other guys nearly equally
deserving get nothing. But still, trying to determine "originality" is a
fool's errand just like copyright on so much of art is a fool's errand.

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itronitron
those fonts are so familiar that I am surprised they are not in the public
domain already, maybe they are just refinements of old standbys?

