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Note: I think Edward Webber (Loki of Lokitorrent) is one of the biggest chickenshit cowards around; he betrayed the trust of everyone who took him at his word, and I hope it takes him the rest of his miserable, hopefully poverty-stricken life to pay them (the MPAA) the full million dollars which they were awarded.

Anywho, here's the link:
http://unicast.org/stuff/lokitorrent/

Now I'll sit back and await the "troll" mod(s) that my posts always seem to [unjustly, IMO] garner.

It's perfectly real. I downloaded the court documents from Pacer (the online docket system of the US Courts) and put on my website. It includes the permanent injunction signed by the judge that closed the case.

• Bright (download) is the best non-dithering quantiser in the whole world, and reasonably fast, too; based on dlquant
• pngrewrite sorts the palette
• pngcrush removes junk chunks, fixes Photoshop's gamma bug and tries many filters to find a smaller filesize
• OptiPNG is similar to pngcrush, but executes much faster
• pngout uses an alternative deflate, yields sometimes even smaller filesizes
• tweakpng manipulates chunks comfortably with a GUI
• pngquant quantises PNG24 with alpha transparency to PNG8 with transparent palettes, the result is alas mostly ugly

sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.

Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.

If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?

yeah you're right. Sarah Flannery actually cracked it herself. link here.

Here is more background information about ArsDigita:

ArsDigita VCs v. Co-founders: The battle for control of ArsDigita Corporation

To me, the entire dispute was very interesting.

...is how much of arsdigita was skill, and how much was dotcom bubble.

Greenspun is right, he and some friends built the company up to be quite formidable. It could be argued that they did this at just the correct time. He personally had a lot of technical insight (as evidenced by his book Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing) but was perhaps lacking in business acumen.My own suspicion is if they were still in charge and had *not* gone for funding, the company would still be around. It has been unfortunate watching the company stagnate, and the layman would certainly see the progression of success, funding, stagnation, winding up.

The VC's certainly didn't seem to understand the culture when they took on the company, which led to quite a few people leaving, and disquiet from the people who had previously supported the culture and ethos of the firm. Whether it was this that caused the problems, or the simple fact that the company, once obtaining approximately 30 million, would have to earn that back to be even back to 0, it is difficult to tell.

When Greenspun took on the VC's, which was a gutsy move which ended up in court as fully described here, he failed to take the company back, but it is conjectured that he got a nice settlement in the article.

What do people think? Was his culture a winner? He comes in for quite a bit of stick about his methods to get the best out of software engineers (work them extremely hard, don't give them a family life, but give them fishbowls, toys, and the hope of a ferrari). I personally don't think they should have gone to the VC's but I don't blame him. The idea of cashing out with millions personally would probably make me do the same thing. However, that's the one thing you've got to realise. If you go to VC's, you have got to read the contract, and try to imagine that the impossible could happen.

thenerd.

Some old documents on what ArsDigita used to be like are available here and here.

Some old documents on what ArsDigita used to be like are available here and here.

Here are court documents

here

You can read the complaint (the description of the lawsuit) at Guan Yang's site. Since it's a 4 MB PDF, mostly full of scans of things like the ArsDigita by-laws, allow me to summarize. Note that I'm not a lawyer and might get things wrong.

philg = Philip Greenspun
jsc = Jin Choi
eveander = Eve Andersson
teadams = Tracy Adams
allen = Allen Shaheen
ernb = Ernest Blackwelder

philg, jsc, and the VCs all signed a stockholders agreement in March, 2000, which stated that the ArsDigita by-laws cannot be changed without the consent of the VCs.

The by-laws at the time of the agreement stated that only the Board of Directors (not the stockholders) can elect/remove company officers.

The stockholders agreement also says that everyone signing the agreement must vote to elect the CEO and two other senior company officers to the Board, and that the other two directors must be acceptable to the VCs. There are five directors in total.

On April 5, 2001, philg and jsc (who in combination own a majority of ArsDigita stock) signed an "action of stockholders by written consent", known in the complaint as the Contested Consent.

The Contested Consent amends the by-laws of ArsDigita, such that the stockholders directly elect the company officers. It demotes allen to President, appoints philg CEO, and appoints eveander and teadams as Executive VPs. It removes allen and ernb from the Board and elects teadams and eveander to the Board.

So basically, in exchange for capital, the VCs made philg and jsc give up control of the company. Now philg and jsc and trying to take back control, so the VCs are suing. Why are they suing philg, teadams, and eveander, but not jsc? I don't know.

-- Rob Mayoff, April 19, 2001

Unfortunately, Greenspun signed a shareholder's agreement when the VCs came in that probably prevents him from doing this, so it looks like the money people win again (as usual.)

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so I could be reading the document wrong...

It also looks like they (co-founders) tried to get the company back unsuccessfully.

Shaheen has only posted to the ArsDigita developer community twice in over a year at aD. If you compare this to the contributions Philip, Eve and Tracy have given, this is a joke. Of course that is only a tiny measure, but still. Many of the recent aD posts to the news are with false notices that Greenspun left the company. Not true.

These are actually nice people. They once wasted $1000 on sending me to boot camp.

There is more information here, including some of the court materials.