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By filing a copyright protection suit, a fraternity or sorority would have to make its rituals public
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Depends what you mean by public. Courts can have semi-private proceedings or protect privacy in other ways. This is going on right now with some al-Qaeda suspects, but it happens more commonly in trade secret cases.
Let's say a startup company steals Coca-Cola's recipe and uses it to sell its own soda. In Coca-Cola's suit against the company, it would have to reveal its recipe to the court in order to prove that the startup was using the same one. Usually, the judge has power to close the courtroom and order that the records be redacted -- which is just a fancy word for black magic marker censoring the secret language.
The judge, law clerks, and opposing counsel would still see the unredacted documents, but they WOULD be bound to be quiet about it; if they revealed anything, they could be disbarred.
The bigger problem I see with a copyright protection suit is that the simple fact of its filing would be public, and that alone would draw lots of attention to the offending web page (or whatever) in the meantime.
Ivy
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