Is that really considered a derivative work just because they can see the source? Genuinely curious here.
That would be an issue for the courts to work out. I imagine that if it went to court, that argument would certainly be made.
And I expect that the authors of this Busybox clone would retort saying that they've never seen the source of Busybox (and it would be prudent for them to make sure they never have), and unless the Busybox folk could show that they had, that would be the end of it. (Unless there's a patent out there somewhere about making one executable that performs the function of lots of *nix tools, which would be another can of worms entirely.)
And even if the authors of this clone had seen Busybox code they might have a pretty good case as long as none of their code looks like the Busybox code. After all, Busybox doesn't really do anything that special.
If Sony is planning to do a clean-room re-engineering of Busybox -- what's wrong with that? Isn't that essentially what Linux kernel developers have done for all kinds of devices? Again, how is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
I'm with you.
If they really wanted to be fancy about it, they could do the same thing the BIOS cloners did -- have some people write up documentation on what Busybox does, and other people write the clone. But really, the first part is easy -- just decide which commands must be implemented and which flags, and let somebody write it. For bonus points, all people involved certify that they've never looked at the source of Busybox, or perhaps never explicitly used it at all.
If they do this (and it sounds like it's their plan)... I don't see where there's any room to enforce the GPL at all, not with regard to this Busybox clone anyways. All they could do is try to be even more picky about other packages, perhaps trying to step up enforcement of Busybox usage (not a clone, not yet) now.
While I hate rooting for the bad guy, I think Sony has the right idea. (Though I'm sort of surprised that more embedded device makers haven't gone with one of the BSDs rather than Linux simply to avoid the GPL.)
My point wasn't really about the effectiveness of future predictions. It was more about your choice of words.
Saying "X is Y by definition" means that I should be able to open a dictionary, look up X, and find that it says Y. Or if it's in a mathematical sense, it should at least be one of the givens, and then used to determine something.
People seem to use "by definition" as some sort of declaration of absolute, undeniable truth -- when it certainly isn't, not in the way that many people use the term.
In the same vein, when somebody says "it literally blew my mind"... their mind should be blown all over the wall.
So... just for clarification, does an IP identify somebody? or not?
You really ought to know the answer to this by now. But if not, I'll remind you... it depends.
If something bad has been done to you, and you have an IP address, and that IP address has been said to be owned by a person (be it the person who pays the cable modem bill, the company that owns the free WiFi, etc.)... then yes, an IP address clearly and uniquely identifies the responsible party. The letter your lawyer wrote up to send to the person to demand compensation *clearly* states that, after all.
If you've been accused of something bad, and the accusers have an IP address that has been said to be owned by you (as the person who pays the cable modem bill, who owns the WiFi AP that is providing free Internet, etc.)... then obviously not. *Anybody* could have used that IP address -- hackers, crackers, etc. They could have compromised your machine, or they could have done it without touching your machine at all! The logs that have the IP address could have been tampered with, possibly even by the people accusing you. TCP connections can be spoofed, etc.
You seem to be perfectly content with current wireless prices
Really? *That*'s what you got from what I wrote?
You really think wireless is 100 times more costly to the carrier than wired?
I said no such thing. The reality is... I have no idea. I know I can look up what the carriers have paid (which is in the billions) for their bandwidth (again, actual RF bandwidth here) and make an estimate at how far a signal propagates (so that specific bandwidth can't be re-used until you get a certain distance away... but I haven't done the math. I'm sure somebody else has, of course.
But a single coax cable can provide a full GHz of bandwidth with no problems with interference, and I imagine that fiber can carry a lot more than that, and it's easy to put a bunch next to each other. I certainly can see providing wireless bandwidth for the last mile costing 100x as much as providing a similar amount of bandwidth via fiber. Also, this RF bandwidth is hard to expand -- you can't just lay new fiber and get more. You have to buy more -- if it's available, which it rarely is -- or sell new phones and new towers with new gear that's more efficient, and I'm not even sure that the technology is improving much there anymore -- phones are getting faster connections, but I think it's because they're using more actual RF bandwidth rather than being more efficient with it.
My point, again, was that if the difference really is 100x, and wired bandwidth really does cost $0.05/GB to provide -- then they *can* justify their current price structure pretty easily.
But yes, I do think there's a lot of "because they can" -- but it's far, far more obvious with texting than it is with data since texting uses *so* little data, so much less than even talking.
The citations may not be fair but the GPs argument is still valid: blaming data hogs is just an excuse.
Well, even the wired Internet providers blame data hogs -- and to be fair, nobody has really given a good reason why this they *shouldn't* be blamed.
As for "even if the construction and maintenance of wireless networks were 100 times as expensive as their wired counterparts, the cost still isn't justified" -- um, I'd say at even 100 times, it could be justified. $5 for 1 GB, but you're paying $20? The rest would be advertising, administering, providing support, subsidizing your fancy phone, some profit would be nice, etc.
Why is texting charged separately and at a much higher rate than data?
Now that's a different issue, and a much more obvious one, since texting uses minuscule amounts of data. I imagine that one text uses less bandwidth (actual bandwidth, MHz * time) than one *second* of voice calling. (To be more precise, I think that it would take at least ten 160 character text messages take up about the same bandwidth as one *second* of voice calling.)
I'm pretty sure the answer to "why?" there is "because they can".
When the average cost to transfer a gigabyte of data is below 5 cents - http://business.financialpost.com/2011/02/05/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost/ - I don't buy all these complaints from carriers about customers using huge amounts of data, especially since the typical "unlimited" (heh) data plan costs $30/month. At that rate, a customer would have to transfer 600 gigabytes of data in a given month to equal the raw cost of that bandwidth to the carrier.
Now, admittedly, that is based on the raw cost of bandwidth, and, of course, other factors come into play in figuring the cost of delivering that data...
Just for the record, the link you provided talks about wired bandwidth, not wireless bandwidth. If you're providing wireless bandwidth... you have to pay for the wired bandwidth up to your cell phone tower, and then pay for that tower and all the bandwidth (and this is actual bandwidth here -- "a spot from X MHz to Y MHz") it uses.
"Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened..."
[Emphasis added.]
From the point of view of a PR person, this isn't exactly wrong. Setting expectations and such is a key part of doing customer support, and if the customer gets incorrect ideas about what's going to happen, the support person should attempt to bring them around (i.e. control the situation, which is to some degree controlling the customer.) It doesn't always work, but after doing support for a while you get a feel for how to take control of things that are going bad and fix them. Good customer support people "control the customer" (I put it in quotes because it's more "influence" or "calm down" than "control") by discussing things with them, explaining your side, understanding their side, perhaps negotiating with them -- bad ones, well, just look at the email exchange to see one example.
That said, using the term "control the customer" in an interview why he's trying to explain himself after his really bad customer service was a big mistake -- it's too easy to take out of context, and even in-context it's rather damning after the original email exchange. He'd have done much better to say "control the situation" and even then there's better terms to use. Considering that he should have prepared carefully for this interview, flubs like this speak poorly of his PR skills.
As it stands, his emails suggested that he treats all his customers like peons to be stepped on on his way to the big bucks, and unfortunately his interview didn't really change that.
But he is right about one thing -- he's probably been similarly rude to dozens or maybe hundreds of customers like this in the past, and there's thousands of other people out there doing customer support jobs that have treated their customers like this... and normally the most they get is a talking to by their boss or a lost sale. But this one time, he got so much more, and we all get to watch. Not that this is going to get him much sympathy -- lots of us have been treated similarly by customer service somewhere (or perhaps by somebody in actual power like the DMV, police, IRS, etc.) and we're enjoying seeing him get his.
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Then walk away.
Don't like how Facebook does things? Don't use it.
Perhaps use something else with different terms?
Or perhaps adjust your behavior somewhat so that the way they tell you they do things isn't a problem anymore?
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.
Ahh yes, the "if you don't watch our ads you're stealing" argument. (Of course, people have been doing this "stealing" since the first time somebody took a leak during a TV, er, radio commercial, and I could probably think of much older examples if I gave it some thought.)
I do like this distinction you've made. It's stealing if the ad is not odious, but not stealing if it is (that's just protesting) ?
In any event, if this wasn't optional, Adblock would find all their customers moving on to something else, perhaps a fork of Adblock that tries to get *all* the ads, not just the 75% that are extra annoying (or failed to pay the Adblock developers.)
I don't buy the only "25% against any advertising" mantra
I do believe that what they said was probably reasonably accurate.
But remember, what they really claimed was " 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.'".
In order to be part of that 25%, you have to be *strictly* against *any* advertising. If you don't mind TV being free because there's commercials on it, you're part of the 75%. Or if you do mind, but you're not *strictly* against it -- part of the 75%.
If you *hate* web advertisements of all kinds, but don't mind a logo on the side of that brown truck that brings you your stuff -- you're not strictly against *all* kinds of advertising.
It's all in how you word the question. And it sounds like this question was worded *very* carefully.
In any event, people are getting overly upset about this I'd say. My guess is that they were indeed paid for it, but all you have to do is click a button and it goes back to the way it was, so it really shouldn't be that big of a deal. Yes, it has the stench of selling out, but for now it's not so bad -- but if it gets worse, it could very well be time to ditch them.
You're right, I didn't make myself very clear. Of course R/C plane sized drones exist, and there's also toys (but stepping stones to more serious, tiny devices) like the link you provided. But their capabilities are currently severely limited compared to the larger craft.
If you're looking to replace a current police helicopter with all the gear it carries and all the stuff it can do, you can't do it with a 0.60 ci engine sized R/C plane. Not today. You can do some of it, but not all of it. There's a reason they used something as large as a Predator.
Only if you believe that the sheriff's department has a helicopter and would have used it. It's just as likely that, because aerial surveillance is cheaper with drones than helicopters, they'll use it much more often.
Helicopters are indeed massively expensive. I think the Austin Police Department budgets about $1300/hr to use their helicopters. They could do it much more cheaply with a single engine GA-style plane, though they'd give up the ability to hover.
It's not so clear that a Predator is cheaper to fly than a typical police helicopter, however. But smaller drones could be a lot cheaper.
I certainly do believe that unmanned drones will be the future of surveillance, largely due to cost, but for now... that future isn't quite here yet. But it's certainly coming -- R/C model sized drones that mostly fly themselves and are relatively cheap.
Drones make it possible to have an eye looking down at you for your entire life.
Not yet -- after all, drones generally still require a human pilot. (Yes, I know, some run via autopilot. But most of the serious ones do not.)
If you're important enough, they could have an eye looking down at you for your entire life now -- but it would be very expensive. But if we can remove that human pilot, and remove the need for humans to interpret what the cameras see, and especially if we could make the drone the size of a R/C model rather than the GA-plane sized Predator, then the cost could come down to the point where it's cost effective to watch more than a handful of people. But we're not there yet.
and I really should spend a few more seconds thinking about what I'm responding to. Obviously gawk and egrep are existing tools, given as examples, not proposed names for these new tools.
Package management: use it. I would be very surprised if RedHat prevented you from installing whatever logging facility you wanted on your server.
True, but in practice that's likely to be ugly.
There's probably quite a few hooks to the logging facility in other packages that would need to be fixed, Selinux would need some updating, etc.
Hopefully Redhat will just let you choose your syslog daemon and have already made things work with any choice you make. They did that with their mail transport agents, so hopefully...
Your link, to a self-serving article by the "Consumer Attorneys of California," does nothing to support your claim that this was anything other than an unreasonable abuse of the legal process.
I could link to the Hot Coffee Documentary, but of course since the incident is a large part of the documentary, I guess that's "self-serving" too and therefore is also to be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, being a video, it's a bit hard to cite as people can't quickly read it like they can an article.
Or the Wikipedia page, though anybody can edit wikipedia, so it should be dismissed too, right? (To be fair, the wikipedia page doesn't really say that the lawsuit was or wasn't valid -- but it does give a good explanation of what lead up to it and why it turned out the way it did.)
Ultimately, most everything has bias. If you ignore things that are likely to have bias -- you'll be ignoring everything. The smart person can read things, even biased things, and still learn something.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that really considered a derivative work just because they can see the source? Genuinely curious here.
That would be an issue for the courts to work out. I imagine that if it went to court, that argument would certainly be made.
And I expect that the authors of this Busybox clone would retort saying that they've never seen the source of Busybox (and it would be prudent for them to make sure they never have), and unless the Busybox folk could show that they had, that would be the end of it. (Unless there's a patent out there somewhere about making one executable that performs the function of lots of *nix tools, which would be another can of worms entirely.)
And even if the authors of this clone had seen Busybox code they might have a pretty good case as long as none of their code looks like the Busybox code. After all, Busybox doesn't really do anything that special.
If Sony is planning to do a clean-room re-engineering of Busybox -- what's wrong with that? Isn't that essentially what Linux kernel developers have done for all kinds of devices? Again, how is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
I'm with you.
If they really wanted to be fancy about it, they could do the same thing the BIOS cloners did -- have some people write up documentation on what Busybox does, and other people write the clone. But really, the first part is easy -- just decide which commands must be implemented and which flags, and let somebody write it. For bonus points, all people involved certify that they've never looked at the source of Busybox, or perhaps never explicitly used it at all.
If they do this (and it sounds like it's their plan) ... I don't see where there's any room to enforce the GPL at all, not with regard to this Busybox clone anyways. All they could do is try to be even more picky about other packages, perhaps trying to step up enforcement of Busybox usage (not a clone, not yet) now.
While I hate rooting for the bad guy, I think Sony has the right idea. (Though I'm sort of surprised that more embedded device makers haven't gone with one of the BSDs rather than Linux simply to avoid the GPL.)
My point wasn't really about the effectiveness of future predictions. It was more about your choice of words.
Saying "X is Y by definition" means that I should be able to open a dictionary, look up X, and find that it says Y. Or if it's in a mathematical sense, it should at least be one of the givens, and then used to determine something.
People seem to use "by definition" as some sort of declaration of absolute, undeniable truth -- when it certainly isn't, not in the way that many people use the term.
In the same vein, when somebody says "it literally blew my mind" ... their mind should be blown all over the wall.
So... just for clarification, does an IP identify somebody? or not?
You really ought to know the answer to this by now. But if not, I'll remind you ... it depends.
If something bad has been done to you, and you have an IP address, and that IP address has been said to be owned by a person (be it the person who pays the cable modem bill, the company that owns the free WiFi, etc.) ... then yes, an IP address clearly and uniquely identifies the responsible party. The letter your lawyer wrote up to send to the person to demand compensation *clearly* states that, after all.
If you've been accused of something bad, and the accusers have an IP address that has been said to be owned by you (as the person who pays the cable modem bill, who owns the WiFi AP that is providing free Internet, etc.) ... then obviously not. *Anybody* could have used that IP address -- hackers, crackers, etc. They could have compromised your machine, or they could have done it without touching your machine at all! The logs that have the IP address could have been tampered with, possibly even by the people accusing you. TCP connections can be spoofed, etc.
Got it now?
By definition? Um, no.
Predictions that are for a future 30+ years now are often wrong, yes, but they're not wrong "by definition". (And occasionally they're right!)
You seem to be perfectly content with current wireless prices
Really? *That*'s what you got from what I wrote?
You really think wireless is 100 times more costly to the carrier than wired?
I said no such thing. The reality is ... I have no idea. I know I can look up what the carriers have paid (which is in the billions) for their bandwidth (again, actual RF bandwidth here) and make an estimate at how far a signal propagates (so that specific bandwidth can't be re-used until you get a certain distance away ... but I haven't done the math. I'm sure somebody else has, of course.
But a single coax cable can provide a full GHz of bandwidth with no problems with interference, and I imagine that fiber can carry a lot more than that, and it's easy to put a bunch next to each other. I certainly can see providing wireless bandwidth for the last mile costing 100x as much as providing a similar amount of bandwidth via fiber. Also, this RF bandwidth is hard to expand -- you can't just lay new fiber and get more. You have to buy more -- if it's available, which it rarely is -- or sell new phones and new towers with new gear that's more efficient, and I'm not even sure that the technology is improving much there anymore -- phones are getting faster connections, but I think it's because they're using more actual RF bandwidth rather than being more efficient with it.
My point, again, was that if the difference really is 100x, and wired bandwidth really does cost $0.05/GB to provide -- then they *can* justify their current price structure pretty easily.
But yes, I do think there's a lot of "because they can" -- but it's far, far more obvious with texting than it is with data since texting uses *so* little data, so much less than even talking.
The citations may not be fair but the GPs argument is still valid: blaming data hogs is just an excuse.
Well, even the wired Internet providers blame data hogs -- and to be fair, nobody has really given a good reason why this they *shouldn't* be blamed.
As for "even if the construction and maintenance of wireless networks were 100 times as expensive as their wired counterparts, the cost still isn't justified" -- um, I'd say at even 100 times, it could be justified. $5 for 1 GB, but you're paying $20? The rest would be advertising, administering, providing support, subsidizing your fancy phone, some profit would be nice, etc.
Why is texting charged separately and at a much higher rate than data?
Now that's a different issue, and a much more obvious one, since texting uses minuscule amounts of data. I imagine that one text uses less bandwidth (actual bandwidth, MHz * time) than one *second* of voice calling. (To be more precise, I think that it would take at least ten 160 character text messages take up about the same bandwidth as one *second* of voice calling.)
I'm pretty sure the answer to "why?" there is "because they can".
When the average cost to transfer a gigabyte of data is below 5 cents - http://business.financialpost.com/2011/02/05/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost/ - I don't buy all these complaints from carriers about customers using huge amounts of data, especially since the typical "unlimited" (heh) data plan costs $30/month. At that rate, a customer would have to transfer 600 gigabytes of data in a given month to equal the raw cost of that bandwidth to the carrier.
Now, admittedly, that is based on the raw cost of bandwidth, and, of course, other factors come into play in figuring the cost of delivering that data ...
Just for the record, the link you provided talks about wired bandwidth, not wireless bandwidth. If you're providing wireless bandwidth ... you have to pay for the wired bandwidth up to your cell phone tower, and then pay for that tower and all the bandwidth (and this is actual bandwidth here -- "a spot from X MHz to Y MHz") it uses.
So this isn't exactly a fair comparison.
"Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened..."
[Emphasis added.]
From the point of view of a PR person, this isn't exactly wrong. Setting expectations and such is a key part of doing customer support, and if the customer gets incorrect ideas about what's going to happen, the support person should attempt to bring them around (i.e. control the situation, which is to some degree controlling the customer.) It doesn't always work, but after doing support for a while you get a feel for how to take control of things that are going bad and fix them. Good customer support people "control the customer" (I put it in quotes because it's more "influence" or "calm down" than "control") by discussing things with them, explaining your side, understanding their side, perhaps negotiating with them -- bad ones, well, just look at the email exchange to see one example.
That said, using the term "control the customer" in an interview why he's trying to explain himself after his really bad customer service was a big mistake -- it's too easy to take out of context, and even in-context it's rather damning after the original email exchange. He'd have done much better to say "control the situation" and even then there's better terms to use. Considering that he should have prepared carefully for this interview, flubs like this speak poorly of his PR skills.
As it stands, his emails suggested that he treats all his customers like peons to be stepped on on his way to the big bucks, and unfortunately his interview didn't really change that.
But he is right about one thing -- he's probably been similarly rude to dozens or maybe hundreds of customers like this in the past, and there's thousands of other people out there doing customer support jobs that have treated their customers like this ... and normally the most they get is a talking to by their boss or a lost sale. But this one time, he got so much more, and we all get to watch. Not that this is going to get him much sympathy -- lots of us have been treated similarly by customer service somewhere (or perhaps by somebody in actual power like the DMV, police, IRS, etc.) and we're enjoying seeing him get his.
I hope these kooks come to "SSXW" in Spring of 2012 as promised.
Considering the size of this sh*tstorm, if they do ... it'll probably be under a name that is not "Ocean Marketing".
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Then walk away.
Don't like how Facebook does things? Don't use it.
Perhaps use something else with different terms?
Or perhaps adjust your behavior somewhat so that the way they tell you they do things isn't a problem anymore?
You might be legally retarded.
Huh?
His point is perfectly valid. Wikipedia is, for example, all about version control. Somebody defaces a page? Revert.
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.
Ahh yes, the "if you don't watch our ads you're stealing" argument. (Of course, people have been doing this "stealing" since the first time somebody took a leak during a TV, er, radio commercial, and I could probably think of much older examples if I gave it some thought.)
I do like this distinction you've made. It's stealing if the ad is not odious, but not stealing if it is (that's just protesting) ?
In any event, if this wasn't optional, Adblock would find all their customers moving on to something else, perhaps a fork of Adblock that tries to get *all* the ads, not just the 75% that are extra annoying (or failed to pay the Adblock developers.)
I don't buy the only "25% against any advertising" mantra
I do believe that what they said was probably reasonably accurate.
But remember, what they really claimed was " 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.'".
In order to be part of that 25%, you have to be *strictly* against *any* advertising. If you don't mind TV being free because there's commercials on it, you're part of the 75%. Or if you do mind, but you're not *strictly* against it -- part of the 75%.
If you *hate* web advertisements of all kinds, but don't mind a logo on the side of that brown truck that brings you your stuff -- you're not strictly against *all* kinds of advertising.
It's all in how you word the question. And it sounds like this question was worded *very* carefully.
In any event, people are getting overly upset about this I'd say. My guess is that they were indeed paid for it, but all you have to do is click a button and it goes back to the way it was, so it really shouldn't be that big of a deal. Yes, it has the stench of selling out, but for now it's not so bad -- but if it gets worse, it could very well be time to ditch them.
You're right, I didn't make myself very clear. Of course R/C plane sized drones exist, and there's also toys (but stepping stones to more serious, tiny devices) like the link you provided. But their capabilities are currently severely limited compared to the larger craft.
If you're looking to replace a current police helicopter with all the gear it carries and all the stuff it can do, you can't do it with a 0.60 ci engine sized R/C plane. Not today. You can do some of it, but not all of it. There's a reason they used something as large as a Predator.
Only if you believe that the sheriff's department has a helicopter and would have used it. It's just as likely that, because aerial surveillance is cheaper with drones than helicopters, they'll use it much more often.
Helicopters are indeed massively expensive. I think the Austin Police Department budgets about $1300/hr to use their helicopters. They could do it much more cheaply with a single engine GA-style plane, though they'd give up the ability to hover.
It's not so clear that a Predator is cheaper to fly than a typical police helicopter, however. But smaller drones could be a lot cheaper.
I certainly do believe that unmanned drones will be the future of surveillance, largely due to cost, but for now ... that future isn't quite here yet. But it's certainly coming -- R/C model sized drones that mostly fly themselves and are relatively cheap.
Drones make it possible to have an eye looking down at you for your entire life.
Not yet -- after all, drones generally still require a human pilot. (Yes, I know, some run via autopilot. But most of the serious ones do not.)
If you're important enough, they could have an eye looking down at you for your entire life now -- but it would be very expensive. But if we can remove that human pilot, and remove the need for humans to interpret what the cameras see, and especially if we could make the drone the size of a R/C model rather than the GA-plane sized Predator, then the cost could come down to the point where it's cost effective to watch more than a handful of people. But we're not there yet.
I mean ... that could just as easily be a police helicopter up there as a drone.
It's a good tactic though. Public shaming has always been effective.
It's likely to be more effective at stopping people than their mass lawsuits have been.
and I really should spend a few more seconds thinking about what I'm responding to. Obviously gawk and egrep are existing tools, given as examples, not proposed names for these new tools.
"enhanced grep" -> egrep
Well, except that egrep is already taken :)
But yeah, your point is valid and probably correct.
Package management: use it. I would be very surprised if RedHat prevented you from installing whatever logging facility you wanted on your server.
True, but in practice that's likely to be ugly.
There's probably quite a few hooks to the logging facility in other packages that would need to be fixed, Selinux would need some updating, etc.
Hopefully Redhat will just let you choose your syslog daemon and have already made things work with any choice you make. They did that with their mail transport agents, so hopefully ...
(Oops, EU says you can't say that.)
No, as I understand it, you can't claim that water can prevent dehydration. I don't think they stop you from saying that it's wet. (yet?)
Your link, to a self-serving article by the "Consumer Attorneys of California," does nothing to support your claim that this was anything other than an unreasonable abuse of the legal process.
I could link to the Hot Coffee Documentary, but of course since the incident is a large part of the documentary, I guess that's "self-serving" too and therefore is also to be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, being a video, it's a bit hard to cite as people can't quickly read it like they can an article.
Or the Wikipedia page, though anybody can edit wikipedia, so it should be dismissed too, right? (To be fair, the wikipedia page doesn't really say that the lawsuit was or wasn't valid -- but it does give a good explanation of what lead up to it and why it turned out the way it did.)
Ultimately, most everything has bias. If you ignore things that are likely to have bias -- you'll be ignoring everything. The smart person can read things, even biased things, and still learn something.
For the record, the "McDonalds hot coffee" thing was NOT an example of lawsuit abuse, even though it's commonly trotted out as an example of it.
It's more an example of "McDonalds screwed up, then refused to do anything to make it right, then was sued and lost".
More on it can be found here and if you think she wasn't that badly hurt, check out the picture of the burns here (warning: not safe for lunch).