Bob is a homosexual man living in san fransisco, for a living he makes and sells homemade jams and fruit perserves. He is also very successful, selling tons of jams and also becoming very famious.
One day on one of his many trips to buy bob's jams a young jamacian man named Stan thinks to himself "if only i dident have to dish out 50 bucks for each jam, what if i bought the jams and reverse engeered them so i could make them for my self and give bobs secret recipes to my friends for free, after all bob is just a money hungry bastard anyway charging 50 bucks for each jam, what an asshole". And so Stan buys a few of his favorite jams from bob, takes them home and gets to work at figuring out what went into these jams.
After weeks of hard work Stan breaks bob's secret recipe for strawberry jam and after a few more days discovers that almost all his jams include the same basic ingrediants. He quickly sends the
recipe along with this information to a few of his closest friends, so they too will no longer need to pay bob's outragious prices.
Months pass and while Bob is still doing very well he notices that some of his key customers are no longer showing up to buy his jam. He ponders this and reasons that either someone has cracked his secret recipe or someone is making an even better jam, but Lance wasent supposed to come out with his new jams for at least six months.
So Bob gets busy searching the internet and finds www.latestbobsjams.com with all the latest info on which of his jam's recipes have been discovered but does not include the actual recipes. Bob is infuriated and runs downtown to talk to his lawyer who says that Bob most likely wouldent win a court case against joe, (the admin of www.latestbobsjams.com) but a scare tactic would most likely work.
So off goes the email to Joe. And a few days later www.latestbobsjams.com goes down. Bob is delighted and ignorantly thinks that now no one will give out his secret recipes out of fear. But he is sadly mistaken because only a week later he finds out about www.jamplanet.com which not only lists the latest progress in the discovery of Bob's recipes it also lists the latest of his two good friends Steve and Larry as well. Along with at least twenty other people he dosent know.
Bob tries sending out a threatening email to www.jamplanet.com assuming that it will work because it worked with www.latestbobsjams.com. Fred (the admin of www.jamplanet.com) briefly takes only Bob's listings off the site only to consult his lawyer. With his lawyers ok Fred puts back up the Bob section on his site. This was Bob's greatest fear, the scare tactic dident work
and now everyone would know when each of his jams was reverse engeered.
Bob runs to his lawyer and begs him to do something. Bob's lawyer informs him that in court they would most likely lose but that a lawsuit could either scare them off or consume all of there money.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an at least semi-accurate analogy.
Bob is a homosexual man living in san fransisco, for a living he makes and sells homemade jams and fruit perserves. He is also very successful, selling tons of jams and also becoming very famious.
One day on one of his many trips to buy bob's jams a young jamacian man named Stan thinks to himself "if only i dident have to dish out 50 bucks for each jam, what if i bought the jams and reverse engeered them so i could make them for my self and give bobs secret recipes to my friends for free, after all bob is just a money hungry bastard anyway charging 50 bucks for each jam, what an asshole". And so Stan buys a few of his favorite jams from bob, takes them home and gets to work at figuring out what went into these jams.
After weeks of hard work Stan breaks bob's secret recipe for strawberry jam and after a few more days discovers that almost all his jams include the same basic ingrediants. He quickly sends the
recipe along with this information to a few of his closest friends, so they too will no longer need to pay bob's outragious prices.
Months pass and while Bob is still doing very well he notices that some of his key customers are no longer showing up to buy his jam. He ponders this and reasons that either someone has cracked his secret recipe or someone is making an even better jam, but Lance wasent supposed to come out with his new jams for at least six months.
So Bob gets busy searching the internet and finds www.latestbobsjams.com with all the latest info on which of his jam's recipes have been discovered but does not include the actual recipes. Bob is infuriated and runs downtown to talk to his lawyer who says that Bob most likely wouldent win a court case against joe, (the admin of www.latestbobsjams.com) but a scare tactic would most likely work.
So off goes the email to Joe. And a few days later www.latestbobsjams.com goes down. Bob is delighted and ignorantly thinks that now no one will give out his secret recipes out of fear. But he is sadly mistaken because only a week later he finds out about www.jamplanet.com which not only lists the latest progress in the discovery of Bob's recipes it also lists the latest of his two good friends Steve and Larry as well. Along with at least twenty other people he dosent know.
Bob tries sending out a threatening email to www.jamplanet.com assuming that it will work because it worked with www.latestbobsjams.com. Fred (the admin of www.jamplanet.com) briefly takes only Bob's listings off the site only to consult his lawyer. With his lawyers ok Fred puts back up the Bob section on his site. This was Bob's greatest fear, the scare tactic dident work
and now everyone would know when each of his jams was reverse engeered.
Bob runs to his lawyer and begs him to do something. Bob's lawyer informs him that in court they would most likely lose but that a lawsuit could either scare them off or consume all of there money.
And thats where we sit today.
Ok, Maybe i went a little overboard.