The likelihood that a satire provokes a Cease and Desist attack is not so much a function of the increased number of idiot attorneys, but more a function of the duration and accessibility of such satire. Prior satire *events* had finite begin and end points (SD Chicken Act, Kill-Barney skits on Jay Leno), or require a "cost of entry" (the act of purchasing media [books, videotape]) for repeated isolated viewings of such satire. The Web changes everything, though - free access to satire is unprecented, and the 24-7 nature of internet servers gives the impression that as long as the hard disk is spinning, then that satire is being spewed forth at an unrelenting rate.
The perception is that satire "chips away" at the integrity of intellectual property, and that while occasional temporal spurts of satire amount to isolated pin pricks to the stone statue that is IP, web sites are ice-pick-wielding robots from the future that will reduce the statue to rubble in no time flat. Of course, that perception is shared by paranoid IP holders and idiot attorneys who, as I said before, are increasing in number.
If this madness continues, I'm inclined to send nonsense Cease and Desist letters to lawyers everywhere.
I'm an Oracle consultant in the Detroit area and frequent SJ, SF and Sacramento - 4 times this past year alone. Having lived in Michigan all my life and exhausted a very good deal of what there is to see here (you can only go to Mackinaw Island so many times), I fell in love with the variety that NoCal has to offer. I'm seriously considering Sacramento - more affordable, better quality of life, and SF/SJ entertainment is but 1-1.5 hrs away. My fear is that the geeks now low on their stock options will discover this town and do to it what they did to the valley.
Then again, if you were smart enough to move out of the Valley, then you're probably the kind of chap I'd want to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, same goes for the Ham Radio club of Flint, MI: the "Flint Amateur Radio Team", or...
Old McDonald Had A Farm:
I once hypothesized a non-profit called the "Electronic and Industrial Engineers' Information Organization", or "EIEIO".
The likelihood that a satire provokes a Cease and Desist attack is not so much a function of the increased number of idiot attorneys, but more a function of the duration and accessibility of such satire. Prior satire *events* had finite begin and end points (SD Chicken Act, Kill-Barney skits on Jay Leno), or require a "cost of entry" (the act of purchasing media [books, videotape]) for repeated isolated viewings of such satire. The Web changes everything, though - free access to satire is unprecented, and the 24-7 nature of internet servers gives the impression that as long as the hard disk is spinning, then that satire is being spewed forth at an unrelenting rate.
The perception is that satire "chips away" at the integrity of intellectual property, and that while occasional temporal spurts of satire amount to isolated pin pricks to the stone statue that is IP, web sites are ice-pick-wielding robots from the future that will reduce the statue to rubble in no time flat. Of course, that perception is shared by paranoid IP holders and idiot attorneys who, as I said before, are increasing in number.
If this madness continues, I'm inclined to send nonsense Cease and Desist letters to lawyers everywhere.
I'm an Oracle consultant in the Detroit area and frequent SJ, SF and Sacramento - 4 times this past year alone. Having lived in Michigan all my life and exhausted a very good deal of what there is to see here (you can only go to Mackinaw Island so many times), I fell in love with the variety that NoCal has to offer. I'm seriously considering Sacramento - more affordable, better quality of life, and SF/SJ entertainment is but 1-1.5 hrs away. My fear is that the geeks now low on their stock options will discover this town and do to it what they did to the valley.
Then again, if you were smart enough to move out of the Valley, then you're probably the kind of chap I'd want to work with.