From wikileaks, the attorney for the Bank is EVAN N. SPIEGEL, ESQ., of LAVELY & SINGER. Their address is 2049 CENTURY PARK EAST, SUITE 2400, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90067-2906, TELEPHONE: (310) 556-3501, FACSIMILE: (310) 556-3615, www.LavelySinger.com, E-MAIL: espiegel@lavelysinger.com.
Mr. Spiegel is a pretty senior attorney, so I'm surprised by how inept his actions were. There is no need to write so pointedly. There are times when you need to fight, but they are few and far between. Evan's first message did not mention the DMCA at all; it just asked for contact information. His later e-mails began discussing the DMCA, and then threatened legal actions in the U.S., U.K., and Switzerland. Why didn't he just answer politely in the first place?
It's just bad lawyering, in my opinion. Proof is the fact you can still access wikileaks, and you're reading this post because of all the publicity. Backfire!
Good job ignoring the bad news that shoots down your whole theory about "Chinese agression." I guess you're playing the "avoid the bad facts and dazzle with bullshit" theory.
You are wrong. France, Russia, Israel, and Taiwan have the largest industrial espionage programs against the United States.
Furthermore, I don't see how you can accuse China of being militarily aggressive against the United States. The spy plane issue to which you refer does not prove your case. America was flying a spy plane in sovereign Chinese territory tens of thousands of miles away from the United States. One of their fighter planes accidentally hits the plane (the pilot was a hot dog who died in the accident). This was akin to the United States dropping a smart bomb right onto the Chinese embassy in 1998--does that, in your eyes, make America a military aggressor against China, or do you chalk that up to an accident?
In the past fifty years, the United States has fought with many countries. Chinese forces fought Americans in the Korean War, but if you go back long enough, we fought with the English, French, Japanese, Germans, Italians, and Vietnamese. Are those countries all aggressors in your eyes?
China brutalizes their citizens, but it's their problem. Your criticism can be better levied against the American government. We're stuck in a stupid war against Iraq; we spy on each other without warrants; we torture prisoners and citizens; we abandoned judicial trials for all; the poor in Louisiana got screwed after Katrina; Social Security is going to go bankrupt. What does the government do? Create divisive issues as distractions: abortion, gay marriage, stem cells, terrorism, the war on terror, the Axis of Evil, and even steroids in baseball.
Having 2,300 nuclear warheads is like having a billion people in your Army: sounds cool, but useless if you can't get them to the fight. How many ICBM's does China have? How many of those ICBMs can survive a targeted American strike? How accurate are those MIRVs? Don't get me wrong. China can hurt America with their nukes, but American can end China with their nukes. The Chinese are not going to go for the end of the world when they have the upper hand right now in terms of political and economic capital.
I was on a jury before, and I was actually impressed by my fellow jurors. They weren't rocket scientists; their vocabularies were limited (note to trial lawyers: use simple words), and they didn't want to be there, but they TRIED their best to reach the best/fairest result. No one was trying to screw the guy or to screw the MAN. The jury actually tried to figure out what was going on and what the correct verdict should be.
Good luck getting all of your clients, counter-parties, attorneys, staff, and the like to install the same PGP software onto their work and home accounts (where some clients get their e-mail).
The California Supreme Court disqualified a law firm in Rico v. Mitsubishi Motors for using inadvertently-produced privileged information. The facts are particular, but the holding is by its own terms broad: if you get an inadvertent, privileged e-mail, you can only read it to the extent necessary to realize it is privileged and inadvertent; then you must delete all copies of it and notify the sender.
What do you think is harder: building a bridge, which people have been doing for centuries, or engineering Windows Vista, which was a completely unprecedented feat?
It may be intentional, but who did it? Not necessarily the United States and Israel, if you think about it. Iran may not want to let its people access the Internet, while the powerful get Internet via microwave or satellite.
Haha. Well, United States military subs have been specially modified to tap into undersea lines for a long time now. For example, Operation Ivy Bells was exactly this kind of mission. And there are special purpose-built subs, if I remember correctly, that can allow a team to work in a dry area with a wire brought within a sub. The thing is that tampering with a fiber optic lines is readily detectable because operators can sense the slightest change in quality (either in length, signal strength, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
There's no need to do that with these cables. They have at end somewhere, right? So what the NSA/bad guys do is to tap the ends of the wires. The ISP sometimes helps.
That's a very naive view of the world. The real world is unexpectedly complicated and there's lot of room for thinking outside the box. For example, in a U.S. war game, the American forces supposedly had the benefit of a jamming operation that prevented the enemy from communicating at all. The OpFor leader in charge of attacking the American forces used clarion calls from mosques and civilian motorcycle messengers to communicate despite the hypothetical jamming operation. The observers disallowed his communication saying it was outside the rules.
Well, in the real-world in Iraq, the insurgents are hiding behind civilians and mosques. An exercise that makes you reconsider the rules of the game is very important in the real world, where you have to expect the unexpected.
Putting medical research into the arms of an inherently political institution is a bad idea. I would imagine that a conservative government wouldn't be too happy funding medical research in:
Birth control. Those sluts!
HIV/AIDS. Those gays and sluts!
HPV vaccines. Promotes promiscuity, those sluts!
Stem cell research. Baby-killing sluts!
We could have government researching alongside academia, but let's not put all our eggs in one basket.
Getting called out on it BY THE JUDGE is really bad. Parties accuse each other of Rule 11 violations quite frequently, and judges usually ignore these claims--after all, your job is to think outside the box to advocate for your client and this usually pisses off the other side. But for a judge, even a magistrate judge, to say that there may be a Rule 11 violation is out of the ordinary. Wowie.
If you write enough e-mails and let me read them, I can find enough evidence in there of wrongdoing to really mess with your head during a deposition. You know, the e-mails where you (jokingly) write "This code is so good I am going to steal it."
Uhhh, the subpoena was asking for IP logs from over eight months ago. Do you keep IP logs of everyone that accesses every page on your website and keep it for over six months? Even if you do, you're in the minority, or your website generates no traffic.
I read the linked Autoadmit posts. (The lawfirm unfortunately forgot to redact the real life names of the plaintiffs from its filings, and you can figure it out just by going to the links they supply.) The e-mail sent to the entire Yale Law School faculty libeling a plaintiff was sent from a Hotmail address. However, the poster contemporaneously claimed that he was posting from another person's wireless signal behind three anonymous proxies. I doubt he was bluffing because there was already threats of a lawsuit at the time. Nevertheless, it would be funny if he logged into the Hotmal account from home and gets PWND. I'd laugh.
Hee hee. The defendants in this lawsuit don't have to worry about a subpoena to Google. Keker Van Nest, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, also represents the Google. Do you think they would risk losing Google's business just to help out a few damsels in distress who don't bring teh cash?
There is a saying in the law that hard cases make bad law. There are fringe cases where we want to betray our ideals to give a deserving person legal relief. For instance, we believe that evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment should be quashed. But if the evidence was the admission of the location the body of a murdered little girl by the perpetrator, one would truly consider allowing the evidence into consideration because we don't want this guy to get away with it.
I feel the same is true in this case. The AutoAdmit turds deserve to be outed and pinned to the wall. Most of what they said was flat-out libel, and threatening. (However, the posts referring to the fact that a plaintiff's father was a convicted criminal should not be actionable; facts, however embarassing, are not libelous.) But does the end should not justify the means. The plaintiffs want to obtain the IPs of EVERYONE who accessed certain third-party, publicly-available, and non-threatening or libelous websites because some of these people may have been bad guys. This is clearly overreaching, especially when the plaintiffs didn't even subpoena Google for the operators of the Googlepages with the plaintiff's pictures.
I feel sorry for the plaintiffs, but these subpoenas cannot issue. The precedent would ruin the Internet. Imagine if a woman posted that she had a bad experience with a doctor on an abortion-support website, and the doctor sued for libel and demanded the IPs of all readers of the website. If the Autoadmit subpoenas issue, this is where we would be.
The plaintiffs' law firm, Keker & Van Nest LLP, counts Google as amongst its largest customers, and there appears to be a conflict of interest at play. The Autoadmit turds created a Googlepages website with a plaintiff's pictures. The federal jurisdiction was predicated on the copyright violation on this website. Yet KVN did not issue a subpoena to Google for the owners and operators of the Googlepages site in question. Such a subpoena would have been focused and likely to yield only the "bad guys." I would guess, and this is only a guess, that KVN knew which side its bread was buttered and didn't want to force a great client to have to do something "bad"--such as challenge a subpoena in this case. Instead, KVN wants subpoenas for all IPs that accessed various third-party and non-offensive websites because the Autoadmit turds happened to read that site on a certain date.
The "RIM got screwed by patent troll NTP" meme is wrong and is perpetuated by a huge lobbying effort by RIM. NTP made a product practicing the invention back in the '80s, which was unsuccessful because it was too ahead of its time. Then NTP ran out of business. Later, RIM ran around suing everyone for infringing its patent for miniature keyboards on portable electronics. NTP saw a way to make money and offered RIM a relatively cheap license, which RIM refused. RIM could have settled for 5, and then 10, and then 20 million dollars. But they refused each deal until the courts found the patents valid, enforceable, and infringed. With the prospect of a shut down, RIM paid $600 million to make the suit go away.
The entire episode is a lesson in thinking with your balls instead of your brains.
Recently, there was a strike by Broadway stagehands complaining about how they were getting screwed by management. In fact, the union was demanding that producers hire a minimum amount of stagehands per occurrence regardless of need. And more shockingly, the stagehands were making over $100,000 a year!
I encourage everyone to be wary when writing e-mails. If your firm ever gets sued, all that becomes discoverable, and attorneys have to read through all your e-mails and documents to look for interesting things. Avoid long threads and stick with short, clear e-mails. Lots of one-liners leads to situations where a vague line looks incriminating when taken out of context.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, lead the way buddy. I'll be too busy watching American Idol tonight.
From wikileaks, the attorney for the Bank is EVAN N. SPIEGEL, ESQ., of LAVELY & SINGER. Their address is 2049 CENTURY PARK EAST, SUITE 2400, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90067-2906, TELEPHONE: (310) 556-3501, FACSIMILE: (310) 556-3615, www.LavelySinger.com, E-MAIL: espiegel@lavelysinger.com.
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Full_correspondence_between_Wikileaks_and_Bank_Julius_Baer
Mr. Spiegel is a pretty senior attorney, so I'm surprised by how inept his actions were. There is no need to write so pointedly. There are times when you need to fight, but they are few and far between. Evan's first message did not mention the DMCA at all; it just asked for contact information. His later e-mails began discussing the DMCA, and then threatened legal actions in the U.S., U.K., and Switzerland. Why didn't he just answer politely in the first place?
It's just bad lawyering, in my opinion. Proof is the fact you can still access wikileaks, and you're reading this post because of all the publicity. Backfire!
Good job ignoring the bad news that shoots down your whole theory about "Chinese agression." I guess you're playing the "avoid the bad facts and dazzle with bullshit" theory.
You are wrong. France, Russia, Israel, and Taiwan have the largest industrial espionage programs against the United States.
Furthermore, I don't see how you can accuse China of being militarily aggressive against the United States. The spy plane issue to which you refer does not prove your case. America was flying a spy plane in sovereign Chinese territory tens of thousands of miles away from the United States. One of their fighter planes accidentally hits the plane (the pilot was a hot dog who died in the accident). This was akin to the United States dropping a smart bomb right onto the Chinese embassy in 1998--does that, in your eyes, make America a military aggressor against China, or do you chalk that up to an accident?
In the past fifty years, the United States has fought with many countries. Chinese forces fought Americans in the Korean War, but if you go back long enough, we fought with the English, French, Japanese, Germans, Italians, and Vietnamese. Are those countries all aggressors in your eyes?
China brutalizes their citizens, but it's their problem. Your criticism can be better levied against the American government. We're stuck in a stupid war against Iraq; we spy on each other without warrants; we torture prisoners and citizens; we abandoned judicial trials for all; the poor in Louisiana got screwed after Katrina; Social Security is going to go bankrupt. What does the government do? Create divisive issues as distractions: abortion, gay marriage, stem cells, terrorism, the war on terror, the Axis of Evil, and even steroids in baseball.
Having 2,300 nuclear warheads is like having a billion people in your Army: sounds cool, but useless if you can't get them to the fight. How many ICBM's does China have? How many of those ICBMs can survive a targeted American strike? How accurate are those MIRVs? Don't get me wrong. China can hurt America with their nukes, but American can end China with their nukes. The Chinese are not going to go for the end of the world when they have the upper hand right now in terms of political and economic capital.
I was on a jury before, and I was actually impressed by my fellow jurors. They weren't rocket scientists; their vocabularies were limited (note to trial lawyers: use simple words), and they didn't want to be there, but they TRIED their best to reach the best/fairest result. No one was trying to screw the guy or to screw the MAN. The jury actually tried to figure out what was going on and what the correct verdict should be.
Good luck getting all of your clients, counter-parties, attorneys, staff, and the like to install the same PGP software onto their work and home accounts (where some clients get their e-mail).
The California Supreme Court disqualified a law firm in Rico v. Mitsubishi Motors for using inadvertently-produced privileged information. The facts are particular, but the holding is by its own terms broad: if you get an inadvertent, privileged e-mail, you can only read it to the extent necessary to realize it is privileged and inadvertent; then you must delete all copies of it and notify the sender.
What do you think is harder: building a bridge, which people have been doing for centuries, or engineering Windows Vista, which was a completely unprecedented feat?
It may be intentional, but who did it? Not necessarily the United States and Israel, if you think about it. Iran may not want to let its people access the Internet, while the powerful get Internet via microwave or satellite.
If you're a pompous audiophile, go buy your own goddamn CDs and leave the pirating to us poors!
Haha. Well, United States military subs have been specially modified to tap into undersea lines for a long time now. For example, Operation Ivy Bells was exactly this kind of mission. And there are special purpose-built subs, if I remember correctly, that can allow a team to work in a dry area with a wire brought within a sub. The thing is that tampering with a fiber optic lines is readily detectable because operators can sense the slightest change in quality (either in length, signal strength, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
There's no need to do that with these cables. They have at end somewhere, right? So what the NSA/bad guys do is to tap the ends of the wires. The ISP sometimes helps.
That's a very naive view of the world. The real world is unexpectedly complicated and there's lot of room for thinking outside the box. For example, in a U.S. war game, the American forces supposedly had the benefit of a jamming operation that prevented the enemy from communicating at all. The OpFor leader in charge of attacking the American forces used clarion calls from mosques and civilian motorcycle messengers to communicate despite the hypothetical jamming operation. The observers disallowed his communication saying it was outside the rules.
Well, in the real-world in Iraq, the insurgents are hiding behind civilians and mosques. An exercise that makes you reconsider the rules of the game is very important in the real world, where you have to expect the unexpected.
We could have government researching alongside academia, but let's not put all our eggs in one basket.
Getting called out on it BY THE JUDGE is really bad. Parties accuse each other of Rule 11 violations quite frequently, and judges usually ignore these claims--after all, your job is to think outside the box to advocate for your client and this usually pisses off the other side. But for a judge, even a magistrate judge, to say that there may be a Rule 11 violation is out of the ordinary. Wowie.
If you write enough e-mails and let me read them, I can find enough evidence in there of wrongdoing to really mess with your head during a deposition. You know, the e-mails where you (jokingly) write "This code is so good I am going to steal it."
Uhhh, the subpoena was asking for IP logs from over eight months ago. Do you keep IP logs of everyone that accesses every page on your website and keep it for over six months? Even if you do, you're in the minority, or your website generates no traffic.
I read the linked Autoadmit posts. (The lawfirm unfortunately forgot to redact the real life names of the plaintiffs from its filings, and you can figure it out just by going to the links they supply.) The e-mail sent to the entire Yale Law School faculty libeling a plaintiff was sent from a Hotmail address. However, the poster contemporaneously claimed that he was posting from another person's wireless signal behind three anonymous proxies. I doubt he was bluffing because there was already threats of a lawsuit at the time. Nevertheless, it would be funny if he logged into the Hotmal account from home and gets PWND. I'd laugh.
Hee hee. The defendants in this lawsuit don't have to worry about a subpoena to Google. Keker Van Nest, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, also represents the Google. Do you think they would risk losing Google's business just to help out a few damsels in distress who don't bring teh cash?
There is a saying in the law that hard cases make bad law. There are fringe cases where we want to betray our ideals to give a deserving person legal relief. For instance, we believe that evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment should be quashed. But if the evidence was the admission of the location the body of a murdered little girl by the perpetrator, one would truly consider allowing the evidence into consideration because we don't want this guy to get away with it.
I feel the same is true in this case. The AutoAdmit turds deserve to be outed and pinned to the wall. Most of what they said was flat-out libel, and threatening. (However, the posts referring to the fact that a plaintiff's father was a convicted criminal should not be actionable; facts, however embarassing, are not libelous.) But does the end should not justify the means. The plaintiffs want to obtain the IPs of EVERYONE who accessed certain third-party, publicly-available, and non-threatening or libelous websites because some of these people may have been bad guys. This is clearly overreaching, especially when the plaintiffs didn't even subpoena Google for the operators of the Googlepages with the plaintiff's pictures.
I feel sorry for the plaintiffs, but these subpoenas cannot issue. The precedent would ruin the Internet. Imagine if a woman posted that she had a bad experience with a doctor on an abortion-support website, and the doctor sued for libel and demanded the IPs of all readers of the website. If the Autoadmit subpoenas issue, this is where we would be.
The plaintiffs' law firm, Keker & Van Nest LLP, counts Google as amongst its largest customers, and there appears to be a conflict of interest at play. The Autoadmit turds created a Googlepages website with a plaintiff's pictures. The federal jurisdiction was predicated on the copyright violation on this website. Yet KVN did not issue a subpoena to Google for the owners and operators of the Googlepages site in question. Such a subpoena would have been focused and likely to yield only the "bad guys." I would guess, and this is only a guess, that KVN knew which side its bread was buttered and didn't want to force a great client to have to do something "bad"--such as challenge a subpoena in this case. Instead, KVN wants subpoenas for all IPs that accessed various third-party and non-offensive websites because the Autoadmit turds happened to read that site on a certain date.
KVN should bite the bullet and subpoena Google.
The "RIM got screwed by patent troll NTP" meme is wrong and is perpetuated by a huge lobbying effort by RIM. NTP made a product practicing the invention back in the '80s, which was unsuccessful because it was too ahead of its time. Then NTP ran out of business. Later, RIM ran around suing everyone for infringing its patent for miniature keyboards on portable electronics. NTP saw a way to make money and offered RIM a relatively cheap license, which RIM refused. RIM could have settled for 5, and then 10, and then 20 million dollars. But they refused each deal until the courts found the patents valid, enforceable, and infringed. With the prospect of a shut down, RIM paid $600 million to make the suit go away.
The entire episode is a lesson in thinking with your balls instead of your brains.
Recently, there was a strike by Broadway stagehands complaining about how they were getting screwed by management. In fact, the union was demanding that producers hire a minimum amount of stagehands per occurrence regardless of need. And more shockingly, the stagehands were making over $100,000 a year!
I encourage everyone to be wary when writing e-mails. If your firm ever gets sued, all that becomes discoverable, and attorneys have to read through all your e-mails and documents to look for interesting things. Avoid long threads and stick with short, clear e-mails. Lots of one-liners leads to situations where a vague line looks incriminating when taken out of context.