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You could dig through the links and actually find the evidence.

Whether or not Swartz was naive, or not, or his suicide was justified, or not, all of us who respected what he stood for can continue his work on such a low flame that none of us runs any significant risk.

For example, I just finished using my $14.90 "quarterly free" allocation on PACER to upload documents to RECAP. Some history about RECAP can be found here. I encourage everyone who admired Swartz to open a PACER account and continue the work of populating RECAP.

> Committing suicide to avoid this process, for example, is not a responsible thing to do.

What is your opinion of armed rebellion against an unjust government? Because the particular case of Swartz's suicide strikes me as a strange kind of passive-aggressive version of armed rebellion.

On a related note, I just finished using my $14.90 "quarterly free" allocation on PACER to upload documents to RECAP. Some history about RECAP can be found here. I encourage everyone who admired Swartz to open a PACER account and continue the work of populating RECAP.

I've pulled the complaint from PACER and uploaded it to docstoc:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/98231225/ACS-Atlas

How about using the RECAP Firefox plugin , so that it would get uploaded automatically to the Internet Archive?

Did you use RECAP when you were retrieving the docs? If you're into looking up things on PACER and sharing things that should be free you should give it a whirl.

Please use the RECAP extension so to docs can transfer to archive.org and not everyone has to pay 8 cents per page.

This site was established as a personal blog for whatever shit Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) found interesting or relevant. The fact that it's mostly technology stuff is purely because Rob Malda is a nerd, like most of the rest of us. But that doesn't mean it all has to be technical stuff.

Whatever Rob Malda's intentions were when he started this site nearly 14 years ago is of little relevance now. Rob doesn't own the site. Geek.net is the owner and it is managed by these people. Since Geek.net is a public company we can see exactly what they think Slashdot's purpose is. I quote from their latest annual report filing:

Slashdot serves technology professionals and technology enthusiasts with timely, peer-produced and peer-moderated technology news and discussion. Slashdot's lively and robust on-line conversations and interactions leverage its innovative comment and moderation system. Slashdot served 3.8 million unique visitors in December 2009.

That is what the owners and managers of Slashdot say the purpose of Slashdot is.

Legal stupidity is interesting and relevant to all of us, because you never know when this brain rot is going to affect you directly, through no fault of your own. Just because it's not a case involving computers doesn't mean a thing.

I know what you are saying, but there is enough legal craziness to fill a web site all on its own. I think it's important that we pick the stories that would be relevant to us, not just those that are sensationalist. For example, look at the original story. It gives a broad overview and that's it. There's no investigation and no discussion of the judges decision or why he or she might have ruled they way that they did. It's just newspaper filler.

Where a site like Slashdot could easily add value is to look up the case in PACER, preferably using a tool like RECAP for Firefox so that the public documents are then automatically uploaded to the Internet Archive. That would make the court documents available to everyone for free enabling all of us to read the judge's decision and rational as well as see what case law was cited for the decision.

The discussions on Slashdot are one of the site's strengths. Having this little extra bit of information would allow us to examine the real story behind this case and have a meaningful discussion about it. There are several practicing lawyers that post on Slashdot and they may be able to offer insight into the case. Instead, we can only argue about it from a position of ignorance and supposition. I don't get much value out of that, and so I and others complain. We complain because we care. We like Slashdot and want to see it improve. If the Slashdot team were willing to add this extra value then it's something I would gladly pay for.

If we had the transcript, maybe we could see:

• Did the judge understand the patent?
• How did the judge interpret each concept?
• What misconduct did the judge see?
• Is the exclusion of future products that remove meta data there because the patent doesn't cover that or because the judge wants to give MS a path to avoid future infringement?
• Any hints at what MS's possible grounds for further appeal are?

The court transcript, even though it's a public domain document, is only provided to people by the court if they make an account and pay 8c per page. Once you have the page, since it's public domain, you can post it anywhere. RECAP is a Firefox or IceCat plugin that can automatically post those public domain transcripts to archive.org so that we can all read them and link to them, and that would help with documenting case law in the USA on swpat.org, among other things.

If we could see the court transcript, we'd have more info about why MS were fined x, y, z.

If someone has a PACER account, they could put the transcript on archive.org simply with the RECAP plugin:

* https://www.recapthelaw.org/

And then we could have a more complete picture on http://en.swpat.org/wiki/I4i_v._Microsoft