If Emarketers talk fast enough to convince a non-tech-savvy judge that their IP addresses and servers were hijacked, it's not a long step from there to getting Steve and the other named parties designated as terrorists... That would make it difficult for Steve and the other non-US based folks to travel, and could well end up in jail-time for the few named US folks.
Is it not possible for the named co-defendants to counter-claim libel and defamation of character? After all, this guy is claiming that the named people acted in concert to put his various buddys out of business, that they hijacked his ip addresses and, perhaps worst of all, hijacked his servers.
Never mind that the suit is poorly written from the technical point of view, he's basically accusing the named co-defendants of acts of terrorism against a US-based company...
Also never mind that the most of the co-defendants are located outside the US, are not US citizens, and therefore couldn't give a rat's ass about 1st Amendment protected speech...
OK, so maybe the plaintiff has no assets, yada, yada, yada, so any damages awarded would never be paid, but maybe they could get a judge to smack the idiot lawyer for stupidity.
You can kill someone with pretty much anything - a 10 ton truck full of gravel, for example. It wouldn't even need to be dumped directly on you - just burying the car you're in would probably do the trick...
People have run off the road outside my house in icy weather - if I laid a shallow concrete pan right there for my kids to skate on, at least one of those drivers would have slid clear across and slammed into a concrete wall. That would have severely damaged the car, and probably caused actually bodily injury.
And in this particular case, the RIAA would get around such laws by setting up a class action on behalf of all the artists that had copyrighted works infringed.
Never mind that the copyright is probably assigned to an RIAA member, the artists are theoretically supposed to get some small percentage of the sales, and are therefore suffering damages from illegal copying.
If the opt-out list is so wonderful, why hasn't anyone thought of making it an opt-in list?
Think about it a minute - if telemarketing irritates enough people that the government legislates ways for people to hit back, why don't they simply issue an outright ban of telemarketing except for people that opt-in? Make that opt-in for a particular type of product too, and not just for whatever random products the various "affliates" are marketing...
I realize that I'm replying to a UK poster, and that US "freedom of speech" is likely to be the counter-argument. In order to head that off, perhaps the US audience should consider that "freedom of speech" doesn't equal "guaranteed audience". If someone is speaking on a street corner, you are free to take a different route or simply pass by. The speaker has no right to force you to walk past him or to stop you in the street and make you listen. This is the equivalent of the telemarketing "opt-in" list.
In a nutshell, I'm saying, "Why on earth should I have to opt out? I'll opt in if I feel like it."
All of which are just fine if you're the single occupant of the room (or even house), but when there are multiple other occupants, there'd better be some very good conflict resolution software in the loop.
Sure, it's easy enough to count the folks in any given room and make the decision to turn the lights off when the last person leaves, but what if I like the lights bright and my wife doesn't? If I'm in the room with the lights bright and she walks in, should it dim the lights? Pick some point between our two references? Same goes for TV channels/volume, room temp, etc.
And what about visitors? Imagine a SuperBowl party where the host leaves the room to take a leak and the TV shuts down... Guess you'd need to hand out IDs as visitors enter the house...
Recall the DeCSS case. Several dozen named defendants, and several hundred "Does", were threatened in court by the DVD-CCA, acting as a representative of the interests of some of the largest companies on Earth. Whammo, most of the people capitulated, the courts bowed to the pressure of the RIAA's fat pocketbooks, and the DVD-CCA's will became law-- DeCSS is now effectively "illegal".
I realize this is wishful thinking, and way too late, but what do you suppose would have happened if the various DVD-player-for-Windows software houses had taken that lesson to heart and declined to produce their players? Would the sudden lack of legal players for Windows have had a noticeable effect on the MPAA? It would certainly have had some effect on their potential market, but would it have been enough?
Ah well, too late now. And anyway, it would only have required one software house to not give a damn...
BTW, do any of the legal Windows DVD players work well in Linux?
Go ahead and try it - I think you'll be unpleasantly surprised when you find that by freely broadcasting packets onto the ISPs network, you effectively give them permission to read the headers. After all, how on earth can the ISP route your packets if they don't read the headers?
They don't need to "break into your network", or "circumvent your reasonable security technology" when you, of your own free will, actually hand them the packets...
Anyway, why would you think that the number of computers in your house is covered by the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act??
They're reading the headers on packets that you are transmitting onto a public network. This has to be done anyway, if you expect those packets to reach their destinations.
BTW, if you truly believe that only the intended recipient is reading the packets you send out, I have a piece of land down in Florida that might interest you...
The NAT detection methods outlined so far record only the packet headers, not the contents. So, 1) it doesn't really make any difference if the content is encrypted; and 2) they don't see the content anyway. The headers are the envelopes that contain the source and destination addresses and miscellaneous other info.
In the real world, this would be like the USPS sorting office scanning the fronts of envelopes, then working out how many people live at your house by correlating magazine subscriptions and so on.
On the other hand, I think the first part still stands - if a company with big enough coffers and/or big enough lawyer brigade can prove they have prior art, doesn't that bring Charlie to a screeching halt? Or is that another one of those "perfect world" scenarios, and in fact a judge wouldn't invalidate a patent regardless of prior art?
On a slightly different note, if prior art exists, could Charlie and his LLC of lawyers be beaten up for copyright violations? I don't imagine the DMCA would apply, but it would be kinda funny to see it used to chill Charlie's activities...
Unfortunately, if it came to court and you still didn't show up, he'd probably win. The judge would see an apparently valid patent, documentation showing that you appeared to be violating the patent, and worst of all, an apparent disregard of the court.
You'd lose, be ordered to pay damages (or whatever) for the patent violation, and you probably get an invitation from the judge to discuss contempt of court...
Charlie would only need to find one pro-bono lawyer to jumpstart the whole process.
Just reading the abstract at the top of the application, it kinda looks to me like it applies to just about any kind of communication. Fortunately, it actually refers to computers further down in the detailed descriptions. Otherwise, I'd think the USPS and the Baby Bells would be more than a little irritated to find their entire businesses patented by some jumped-up little fart.
Never mind all the "little fish" that might cave in after the first lawsuit salvo and thereby fund the warchest. What I don't really understand is why legal "prior art" of the "well, judge, we sued all these other folks and they settled, so we must be right" kind would have any effect against a company of any size.
I mean, if Big Co Inc has real, provable prior art that blows this guy out of the water, would that not trump any number of previous out-of-court settlements? Furthermore, could the "little fish" subsequently get together and use Big Co Inc's triumph as the basis for suing to get their bogus licence fees refunded? After all, they only paid because they believed the patent was valid - if it was subsequently invalidated, they ought to get their money back, right?
I seem to remember the Radio Amateurs putting up their own satellite. Was I dreaming, or was that real? If real, there's your link from town to town... Low data-rate, maybe, but still a link...
Even if I did dream it, other methods are possible, though maybe not so reliable.
The genie's already out of the bottle, and no legislation is ever going to stuff it back in. If necessary, us geeks will revert to uucp-style networking - for those too young to remember, that's dial up connections from place to place, covering the whole planet.
It won't get that far, though. I mean, it won't devolve to dial-up. Before that happens, there'll be privately operated line-of-sight connections between neighborhoods using lasers, private citizens laying their own fibre or copper around those neighborhoods, and radio amateurs running satellite links between towns.
If you think that's a bit far fetched, www.scitoys.com has plans for a basic laser communicator that can carry a radio signal across a room using a $10 laser pointer. Shouldn't be too hard to beef that up to reach across a road or further.
Yep, piss enough of us off, and we'll simply take the network away from the Baby Bells and see how they like that...
After reading Mark's comments I have to say I think all his points are good ones. There will certainly be an adverse effect on web search engines, and there will certainly be a lot of time wasted on both sides redirecting people to the other project.
FWIW, I'd say that the the folks causing the collision should be backing up and apologising. Mozilla Firebird hasn't had very long to become entrenched in the public awareness and it wouldn't be too great a hardship for them to suck it up and switch again. There have been plenty of good suggestions made here. Is Mozilla Firebird so radically different that it couldn't be called Mozilla2.0??
My son and a friend were stopped while about to board a cruise ship, because one of them was carrying a video camera. Upon being told that videoing the port area was illegal, they attempted to explain that the camera was turned off and the lens cap was in place. This only made the situation worse - they were interrogated in separate rooms for over half an hour, with the security folks apparently unable or unwilling to listen to reason.
My son was unfailingly polite during the whole incident, but whenever he suggested that they simply play back the tape to see what was on it, he was told "Don't get smart with us, we can throw you in jail." After being released, the boys were talking about the incident, only to discover the same security officer standing behind them on the escalator. He subjected them to another half hour of harrassment, after waving vaguely towards a group of random civilians that he claimed "were witnesses to the boys filming the port area, and that the boys had repeatedly pushed the camers in their faces".
Both times it would have taken maybe 2 minutes to review the tape and issue a warning about not using the camera. Both times the security officer felt it more important to throw them against the wall, make them "assume the position", pat them down and verbally harangue them.
That meeting with Blackboard should have given Acidus and Virgil a clue about how the public exposure would go.
Perhaps a better approach would have been to engage the interest of a local TV news station and arrange, with cooperation from campus security, a live broadcast of a break-in on a Coke machine. If the guys were suitably disguised (ski masks?) and the details sufficiently fuzzy to prevent casual replication by "script kiddies", I'd think they might get away with it. Especially if the news crew leaned heavily towards "the security provided by the cards is clearly crap", instead of "look what these hackers just did".
They wouldn't even have to name Blackboard specifically, just mention that the system so easily cracked is used by major Universities to "secure" thousands of devices, ranging from Coke machines to the girls dorm...
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Just like getting a printed catalog through the mail, with the added bonus that you can easily google for more information about the products...
If Emarketers talk fast enough to convince a non-tech-savvy judge that their IP addresses and servers were hijacked, it's not a long step from there to getting Steve and the other named parties designated as terrorists... That would make it difficult for Steve and the other non-US based folks to travel, and could well end up in jail-time for the few named US folks.
Never mind that the suit is poorly written from the technical point of view, he's basically accusing the named co-defendants of acts of terrorism against a US-based company...
Also never mind that the most of the co-defendants are located outside the US, are not US citizens, and therefore couldn't give a rat's ass about 1st Amendment protected speech...
OK, so maybe the plaintiff has no assets, yada, yada, yada, so any damages awarded would never be paid, but maybe they could get a judge to smack the idiot lawyer for stupidity.
Yeah, but if you're shooting it at a ballistic missile, a small hole would be sufficient, as shown by the loss of the shuttle Columbia.
People have run off the road outside my house in icy weather - if I laid a shallow concrete pan right there for my kids to skate on, at least one of those drivers would have slid clear across and slammed into a concrete wall. That would have severely damaged the car, and probably caused actually bodily injury.
Never mind that the copyright is probably assigned to an RIAA member, the artists are theoretically supposed to get some small percentage of the sales, and are therefore suffering damages from illegal copying.
Think about it a minute - if telemarketing irritates enough people that the government legislates ways for people to hit back, why don't they simply issue an outright ban of telemarketing except for people that opt-in? Make that opt-in for a particular type of product too, and not just for whatever random products the various "affliates" are marketing...
I realize that I'm replying to a UK poster, and that US "freedom of speech" is likely to be the counter-argument. In order to head that off, perhaps the US audience should consider that "freedom of speech" doesn't equal "guaranteed audience". If someone is speaking on a street corner, you are free to take a different route or simply pass by. The speaker has no right to force you to walk past him or to stop you in the street and make you listen. This is the equivalent of the telemarketing "opt-in" list.
In a nutshell, I'm saying, "Why on earth should I have to opt out? I'll opt in if I feel like it."
Just let us know when and where you're going to shoot one of those things off - I want to be in a different state...
Hey, it could happen :)
Sure, it's easy enough to count the folks in any given room and make the decision to turn the lights off when the last person leaves, but what if I like the lights bright and my wife doesn't? If I'm in the room with the lights bright and she walks in, should it dim the lights? Pick some point between our two references? Same goes for TV channels/volume, room temp, etc.
And what about visitors? Imagine a SuperBowl party where the host leaves the room to take a leak and the TV shuts down... Guess you'd need to hand out IDs as visitors enter the house...
It would still be cool, though. :)
I realize this is wishful thinking, and way too late, but what do you suppose would have happened if the various DVD-player-for-Windows software houses had taken that lesson to heart and declined to produce their players? Would the sudden lack of legal players for Windows have had a noticeable effect on the MPAA? It would certainly have had some effect on their potential market, but would it have been enough?
Ah well, too late now. And anyway, it would only have required one software house to not give a damn...
BTW, do any of the legal Windows DVD players work well in Linux?
Tell that to all the folks who got pissed at the Dixie Chicks for their comments about Bush and the War...
They don't need to "break into your network", or "circumvent your reasonable security technology" when you, of your own free will, actually hand them the packets...
Anyway, why would you think that the number of computers in your house is covered by the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act??
They're reading the headers on packets that you are transmitting onto a public network. This has to be done anyway, if you expect those packets to reach their destinations.
BTW, if you truly believe that only the intended recipient is reading the packets you send out, I have a piece of land down in Florida that might interest you...
In the real world, this would be like the USPS sorting office scanning the fronts of envelopes, then working out how many people live at your house by correlating magazine subscriptions and so on.
On the other hand, I think the first part still stands - if a company with big enough coffers and/or big enough lawyer brigade can prove they have prior art, doesn't that bring Charlie to a screeching halt? Or is that another one of those "perfect world" scenarios, and in fact a judge wouldn't invalidate a patent regardless of prior art?
On a slightly different note, if prior art exists, could Charlie and his LLC of lawyers be beaten up for copyright violations? I don't imagine the DMCA would apply, but it would be kinda funny to see it used to chill Charlie's activities...
You'd lose, be ordered to pay damages (or whatever) for the patent violation, and you probably get an invitation from the judge to discuss contempt of court...
Charlie would only need to find one pro-bono lawyer to jumpstart the whole process.
Just reading the abstract at the top of the application, it kinda looks to me like it applies to just about any kind of communication. Fortunately, it actually refers to computers further down in the detailed descriptions. Otherwise, I'd think the USPS and the Baby Bells would be more than a little irritated to find their entire businesses patented by some jumped-up little fart.
I mean, if Big Co Inc has real, provable prior art that blows this guy out of the water, would that not trump any number of previous out-of-court settlements? Furthermore, could the "little fish" subsequently get together and use Big Co Inc's triumph as the basis for suing to get their bogus licence fees refunded? After all, they only paid because they believed the patent was valid - if it was subsequently invalidated, they ought to get their money back, right?
Would it have been so hard for Mozilla to do that before announcing their new name?
Even if I did dream it, other methods are possible, though maybe not so reliable.
It won't get that far, though. I mean, it won't devolve to dial-up. Before that happens, there'll be privately operated line-of-sight connections between neighborhoods using lasers, private citizens laying their own fibre or copper around those neighborhoods, and radio amateurs running satellite links between towns.
If you think that's a bit far fetched, www.scitoys.com has plans for a basic laser communicator that can carry a radio signal across a room using a $10 laser pointer. Shouldn't be too hard to beef that up to reach across a road or further.
Yep, piss enough of us off, and we'll simply take the network away from the Baby Bells and see how they like that...
FWIW, I'd say that the the folks causing the collision should be backing up and apologising. Mozilla Firebird hasn't had very long to become entrenched in the public awareness and it wouldn't be too great a hardship for them to suck it up and switch again. There have been plenty of good suggestions made here. Is Mozilla Firebird so radically different that it couldn't be called Mozilla2.0??
flame on!
My son and a friend were stopped while about to board a cruise ship, because one of them was carrying a video camera. Upon being told that videoing the port area was illegal, they attempted to explain that the camera was turned off and the lens cap was in place. This only made the situation worse - they were interrogated in separate rooms for over half an hour, with the security folks apparently unable or unwilling to listen to reason.
My son was unfailingly polite during the whole incident, but whenever he suggested that they simply play back the tape to see what was on it, he was told "Don't get smart with us, we can throw you in jail." After being released, the boys were talking about the incident, only to discover the same security officer standing behind them on the escalator. He subjected them to another half hour of harrassment, after waving vaguely towards a group of random civilians that he claimed "were witnesses to the boys filming the port area, and that the boys had repeatedly pushed the camers in their faces".
Both times it would have taken maybe 2 minutes to review the tape and issue a warning about not using the camera. Both times the security officer felt it more important to throw them against the wall, make them "assume the position", pat them down and verbally harangue them.
Perhaps a better approach would have been to engage the interest of a local TV news station and arrange, with cooperation from campus security, a live broadcast of a break-in on a Coke machine. If the guys were suitably disguised (ski masks?) and the details sufficiently fuzzy to prevent casual replication by "script kiddies", I'd think they might get away with it. Especially if the news crew leaned heavily towards "the security provided by the cards is clearly crap", instead of "look what these hackers just did".
They wouldn't even have to name Blackboard specifically, just mention that the system so easily cracked is used by major Universities to "secure" thousands of devices, ranging from Coke machines to the girls dorm...