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Pro Bono Lawyer Fights C&D With Humor
Zordak writes "When Jake Freivald received a questionable Cease and Desist letter from a big-firm attorney, demanding that he immediately relinquish rights to his website http://westorage.info, his pro-bono lawyer decided to treat the letter like the joke that it was. In a three-page missive, the lawyer points out the legal, constitutional, and ethical problems with the letter that led him to conclude that the letter was a joke. He concludes, in a postscript, with an unsubstantiated demand for $28,000 in overpaid property taxes, and offers to lease the city the domain name 'westorange.gov' in exchange."
They wouldn't feel nearly as stupid without biting sarcasm...biting them.
I don't think it's a typo - I *think* it's saying "Trenk has recently completed bid litigation over $100 million" (i.e. he's taken it to trial, to conclusion)
All told it's a vile (and very legal) sentence with no punctuation. The proof-reader in me can't find a way of writing it in a better way though (well, not without rewriting the entire sentence)
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
I wonder if the pro bono lawyer was alluding to something in the final paragraph. Like for example, the hired gun lawyer was representing someone other than the city/municipality?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I think he was doing great until the last P.P.S., when he casually suggested that he could buy westorange.gov, and then sell or license it to the city for over $28,000. If the city ever decided to go through ICANN arbitration, the impression of domain squatting specifically for commercial profit with no evidence of personal use isn't looked on favorably. Considering that the rest of the letter was satire, surely this paragraph is too. But it would be easier not to have to convince an arbitration judge of that fact.
It's the usual bait-and-switch, as soon as they have the money, why not take the life as well?
If you kill a man today, he'll be dead tomorrow. But, if you rob a man today, he'll get more money that you can steal from him tomorrow.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
You joke but that's the entire basis for most governments!
It's still happening in modern day - a group of thugs has enough power to take money for everyone in an area - but if they take everything people will starve. As they work out the best way to keep getting money over time, and optimizing for that, they begin to look very much like any other government, as the payback for providing some basic defense and infrastructure is very real. Eventually people start expecting them to act like a real government, and if they keep power for a generation or so, they become indistinguishable from any other government.
Heck, my biggest complaint about the US government is that they've become too short-sighted - too much looting now at the expense of future growth - the goose that lays the golden egg may look tasty, but c'mon!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You're reading it as English. Don't do that. It's not English, but legal jargon. We throw our own jargon around all the time, and expect people to understand it as such and not interpret it as literal.
Proof: "Use the mouse to move your cursor on the desktop until it's over Firefox icon, then click it.". A more literal translation would be "Use a small rodent to move your sliderule part on the desk you're sitting at until it has a higher vertical height than a religious depiction of a red panda, then make it emit a sharp sound."
We use tech jargon on tech websites. He's using legal jargon on a legal website. That's wholly appropriate, and it's your job to interpret it through the proper filters.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?