Dave's Dilbert Index

Dave's private index of the Dilbert strips has been discontinued until further notice.

As of Tuesday, July 3, 2001, I am discontinuing my indices of the Dilbert® and Get Fuzzy® comic strips at the request of the lawyers representing United Feature Syndicate, Inc., the holders of the copyrights for these strips. After an exchange of letters, they have put forth an argument that, while not compelling, places my activities in a very grey area, legally speaking. This aspect of copyright law has yet to be resolved in the court system, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to be the test case. As you may recall, the notice on this page said in part: Note that this site does not contain the images themselves — your browser is still fetching them from www.dilbert.com. I'm simply providing the indexing service. This practice is called "deep linking" when applied to HTML pages, and "inlining" when applied to other types of resources such as images and sounds. Eric Steiner, of Baker & Hostetler LLP, Cleveland OH, argues that my pages constitute an "unauthorized compilation" of strips that "violates the distribution, diplay and derivative work rights that are part of the bundle of copyright rights." Technically, of course, I am neither distributing nor displaying the strips in question — United Media is doing the former, and the end user's browser is doing the latter. However, my pages appear to create a compilation or derivative work "that is likely to cause confusion among viewers." Personally, I give the viewers more credit than that; but in any case, this will need to be thrashed out in the court system, and I have no desire to be a part of that. Thank you for your patronage, and perhaps the index will return once the legalities have been settled. If you have any questions or comments, I would appreciate hearing from you. Send mail to dilbert@dtweed.com. Here is my Home Page. — Dave Tweed, webmaster