I really want to sue ... for letting people expose magic tricks and sometimes the whole dvd of magic tricks.
I am not a lawyer. I have, however, been sued for copyright infringement four times... so I know something about IP law.
You can't sue, because LMT.org isn't
damaging you. The other people - the creators of the tricks they expose - need to do it. You could, of course, try to organise a class action suit unifying the authors of the tricks... but that's unlikely.
Copyright is pretty limited. If I say "I use this move and that move to do a trick" on a DVD, that's copyrighted, and protected. But in order to get any kind of injunction against someone else for saying that, I have to submit my statement to the public record - where a great many more people will see it. Indeed, by even
threatening legal action, I'm confirming that their exposure is correct.
Furthermore, copyright is extremely limited. If someone else says "I use this move
first and
then that move to do a trick", those two additional words may be sufficient to avoid a finding of copyright infringement. Only a judge can say, and it costs something on the order of a quarter million dollars to get an IP case in front of a judge. Not to mention it will be several years before it gets there.
There's always the option of patent, but you can't even
get a patent until you submit your invention to the public record, and then you have the same problem... except that now, if you threaten legal action, the exposure site can just say "we can't explain this effect because of patent XYZ" where XYZ is a link to the text of the patent itself on the PTO website.
Trademark law comes into play a little bit. You can legitimately demand that people not refer to the trick they expose as "Bob Smith's Way Cool Trick", provided you've trademarked "Way Cool Trick". But that doesn't actually stop them from exposing the trick; only from calling it by the same name you use.
The cure's pretty much worse than the disease, in this case. Doing nothing is actually the least harmful thing we can accomplish.
