CBS Interactive Sued For Distributing Green Dam

Dotnaught writes "Solid Oak Software, maker of Internet filter CYBERsitter, on Monday filed a $1.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS Interactive's ZDNet China for distributing the Green Dam Internet filtering software. Green Dam was going to be mandatory on all PCs in China starting in July, but widespread criticism, including reports of stolen code, forced the Chinese government to reconsider. The lawsuit, if it succeeds, could force companies to give more thought to the risks of complying with mandates from foreign governments that violate US laws."

Comments

Nostalgia

[Ed Avis]

Yes, I remember Cybersitter. Back in the day (1995ish) it used to block me from pages hosted at Oxford University and other random things. This was running on Windows 3.1 with Program Manager crippled so you couldn't start any programs apart from those already in the program groups. I got around it by opening winword.exe with Notepad and randomly changing a few bytes at the start of the file. Now, on trying to run Word, Windows would abruptly crash to a DOS prompt, where I could fix a few things. Ahhh... those were the days...

Re:Reaching Out To Sue Anyone You Can

[Zantac69]

/laughs - why not sue ZDNet China?

Green Dam is made form code stolen from Solid Oak. (yeah its crap code but that is not the point)
ZDNet China is knowingly distributing material that violates copyright.
ZDNet China profits from this distribution via advertisement.
ZDNet China is owned by CBS American.
CBS American is liable for the actions of its subsidiaries.
CBS American is borked.

And yes...CBS KNOWS that there is copyrighted code in there. This has been going on for months - this was not a "suprise - that violates - here is your lawsuit!" situation.

And this is not even close to the same thing that was with Pirate Bay, because they are actually hosting the download.

And this wont kill free software. It will either encourage new novel code...or implementation of coding tricks so that copied code does not look like copied code.