Gracenote has developed filtering methods to compare, combine and correct the information submitted, and we have instituted several levels of editorial oversight to ensure that the information returned to users is as accurate and complete as possible. We license third-party data like album covers, reviews, and artist biographies to further enhance the dataset we deliver to our licensed applications.
So, I'm a little foggy on this...what exactly is it that they own? All of this data is public information, anyone can pull up CD's on Amazon and copy all of the song info. The only difference is that Gracenote has actually paid people to enter this data.
If I pay someone a large amount of money to type in the King James Version of the Bible to post on my website, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that some else downloaded all of my files and posted them on their website, do I have any legal recourse? I would assume not.
Please note, I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on TV.
Here's the message I posted to their board. Since there are 9,000 messages there, and you can only read 5 at a time, it's unlikely to be read there...
Anyway, from a marketing perspective, they want to increase sales for their cards by giving us this unique feature.
From a gamers perspective, those who buy the cards will have a blast with them, and those who don't use Asus cards will constantly be pissed off at the number of cheaters in the game, and this will ultimately result in many online games becoming closed and password-protected, making it very hard for many honest players to find an open, fair game.
From the game developer's POV, this is ultimately detrimental to their market. They want as many people as possible to have a positive experience playing their games, the way the game was intended to be played. They will ultimately view Asus as a threat to their market, and many if not most developers will intentionally make their games incompatible with Asus cards, and will print on the box "DOES NOT WORK WITH ASUS CARDS". The end result is that Asus will lose marketshare, because the most popular games are incompatible with their cards.
It would appear that as far as games, this console will be to the X-Box what Tiger handhelds are to the Game Boy Advance (i.e., not much). The games are probably going to be along the lines of those stupid little games you see at portal sites (card games, board games, antiquated arcade games, etc.). Those are the kinds of games that Nokia is working on for their cell phones, after all.
I would agree with you that the games are probably a waste of engineering effort, but only because they are crappy games. On a related note, I think M$ missed the boat by releasing Ultimate TV and X-Box as two separate products. They should have had a low-end version of X-Box that only played games, and a high end version that did games, TV recording, DVD player, web surfing, email, and MP3's. Instead of proprietary ports, they should have used USB and FireWire, so you could plug in standard PC peripherals. Sure, it would have been a tough to sell one device in two markets, but I think they could have pulled it off.
On the upside, maybe Nokia's efforts will help push the industries towards convergence, so that we don't have 20 separate devices hanging off our TV's.
I don't know why some overzealous moderator modded you down, but this is exactly what I thought. Obviously we have a kid here who is telling a sob story entirely from his point of view. What were the extenuating circumstances? Does he have a history of disciplinary action in his school? What was in that 50 MB file, a porn movie? Did he mouth off to someone when he got caught? Was he adequately warned NOT to email large attachments?
There is definitely more to this story than we are being told by this kid. Granted, there's more than a few pointy-headed school administrators in this country, but a 5-day suspension for unwittingly sending an oversized email sounds way too severe.
It would be in Apple's economic best interest to continue to support PowerPC Linux development, and to actively market their hardware to Linux users when they feel the OS is mature enough on their platform.
From a marketing standpoint, that's probably the LAST thing Apple should do; they would be diluting the Mac OS brand. Apple just spent hundreds of millions to bring its users a Mac-ified version of *nix; actively supporting Linux would only raise questions about Apple's commitment to OS X, and it might even slow development of OS X apps. No, Apple has the right idea: encouraging *nix users who are ready for a decent GUI to make the permanent switch to OS X, and pushing OS X as a better enterprise server OS.
Besides, assuming they did promote Linux on the PPC, Apple can't guarantee that all of those Linux/PPC users would be return hardware customers; once Apple established the market, other vendors like Dell and Gateway would start producing Linux/PPC systems based on the already established CHRP specs, and margins would get slashed to pennies on the dollar overnight. Since Apple has already demonstrated that they can't compete in a cut-throat market like that, they would be forced to exit. At least by promoting OS X, Apple can maintain user loyalty and repeat hardware purchases.
Anyway, Apple already has an open source OS in Darwin. If Apple ever did decide to tackle the internet appliance market, they would do it with Darwin.
All that does is pass the losses on to someone else, it doesn't save the site. Like I said below, there is no substitute for a good and solid business model.
Not necessarily. If someone buys your site, then obviously they already have some ideas on how to grow revenue with it. After all, no savvy business person would spend money on an established venture without first doing an audit of the books, the business model, etc. Selling the site could be a way to grow the brand by putting it in more capable marketing hands.
That's why we have contracts. Hinkley consulted with his dad. If neither one of them wanted to pay for legal counsel before signing the contract, whose fault is it? Do we now say to young entrepreneurs, "Don't get legal counsel, because you might be held responsible"? It's ridiculous.
To look at the other side of the coin, these investors put up a lot of money. My understanding is that the code base became the property of the corporation, and Hinkley lost control of it because he could be outvoted 5 to 1 in board meetings. From the investors' point of view, they bankrolled the operation, and they didn't want some kid to leave with the crown jewels of the organization on a whim. I can understand that.
Great post, and I would go even further to add that Adam's latest response shows that he really hasn't learned anything. To offer up a blanket "All investors are bad! Stay away!!!" shows that he is still lacking any real business acumen.
As I said in another post, I've followed the Hotline story, and everyone paints Adam's side, but I always see the red flags going up. Something tells me that this kid is a hothead, to expect that at 17 or 18, his investors are going to let him do as he pleases with the company. They probably did have him on a string, but only because he alowed himself to be put there.
I mean, really -- would anyone here take seriously a company president who accidentally signed away all his IP rights because he didn't know any better?
The company was forced to reverse-engineer hl, resulting in version 1.6 (1.7?) or so, which included banner ads and a PC version. This was the death knell of the hotline community, which finally degenerated to the land of w4r3z kiddies it is today
I don't think that that's what happened. On his last day as president of the company, Adam took down the web servers, encrypted the code base, and left with a copy of the code burned to CD. The owners immediately filed several suits against him, and had the police raid his home. Adam was facing jail time and stiff fines, so he relented and unlocked the code.
I've followed the story of Hinkley and Hotline over the last few years, and it seems that the whole story has not been said. Hinkley always talks about getting burned, and certainly there were some emotional stand-offs with his company exec's. However, according to this rather detailed account of Hinkley's struggles, his former boss says that he would very much like to have Hinkley back.
Let's be practical...it makes no business sense to rob your star programmer blind and show him the door. Sure, his investors secured the rights to the code in a draconian fashion, but they went to the extrodianry step of making this teenager the president of the company. Something tells me that Adam realized got ticked off when he realized he turned over all property rights, and the friction probably grew when he found out that these seasoned businessmen were treating this teenager as president in name only. I can't say as I entirely blame them, although they shouldn't have made him president in the first place. It was obviously just a tactic to try to keep him onboard.
I wish the kid the best and hope he finds the success he deserves, but frankly, it seems that there has yet to be an account written by an objective 3rd party who can tell us how much of the problem was Hinkley's youth and business inexperience. Signing away all IP rights was pretty naive for a "company president".
OS 9 is only required to be installed if you want to run legacy, or "Classic" apps. Which, of course, is 99% of the Mac apps on the market right now.
OS X doesn't run on top of OS 9; the other way around. When you launch the first Classic app, OS 9 boots up as a process within OS X. This allows OS 9 to take advantage of some features, like improved virtual memory and, I believe, improved multitasking. Also, the Classic environment can still crash, but it won't bring down OS X.
For the most part, OS 9 is invisible to the user. Apple has designed it to be unobtrusive. When you launch a Classic app, it behaves for the most part like any other app.
OS 9.1 is included? Why would that want to bundle an old OS with their new OS? That makes me think that they knew OS X wasn't ready for mass consumption.
The reason is simple... OS 9 runs inside of OS X to provide support for legacy apps. This was Apple's plan from the start.
Well, two things. One, OS X may be missing a few minor things, but other than that it's a fully functional OS. I'm using it right now. It just doesn't have all the spit and polish Apple wanted to give it for the launch.
And two, when you figure that an OS 9.1 CD is included (a $99 retail value), you're basically getting OS X for $30. Not a bad deal.
Personally, I'm glad they shipped it. Have you used it?
i didn't even realize this was on the market yet. no advertising, nothing. not even on the front page of the latest best buy/compusa ads.
There's a reason for that... Apple acknowledges that OS X is still missing a few key features, like DVD and CDRW support. Right now, OS X is only for the early adopters.
According to the rumor sites, Apple is going to wait until MWNY this summer to do the big advertising campaign on OS X. That's when it will start shipping pre-installed on all Apple systems, and when most of the major software vendors are going to sell OS X versions of their apps.
How NeXT even wound up in the running back in '97, I'll never know.
How can you even *say* this? Where's Be's counterpart for the Interface Builder or Project Builder? I doubt their API could hold a candle to OpenStep. Can you honestly say you would rather use C++ than Objective C?
Not to mention the fact that BeOS was still in "beta" at the time, and was missing a lot of hardware support. Gasse was playing a bit of a confidence game, he kept raising the price because he thought he had Apple over a barrel.
OTOH, OpenStep was a shipping, mature, proven OS. And it had the PR benefit of bringing prodigal son Steve Jobs back to Apple.
Gasse should have taken the money and run. He has nobody to kick in the butt now but himself.
The mac veterns will miss it but don't bring obsolete software or an emulator to run HYPERCARD to OS X.
In its current form, yes. It really needs a total rewrite, otherwise Apple will be wasting their time carbonizing it. The last version of HC is now hopelessly outdated.
It's hard to quantify the amount of value that HyperCard added to the Mac. Most people who use computers are not so übergeek that they want to dive into C++, Perl, Java, etc.; just the opposite.
HyperCard offered (for the first time and, perhaps, the last) a development environment that the average person could understand and work with, giving immeasurable power to the user community. That sounds like a pretty heady statement, but it's true. A somewhat small case-in-point was a Greek class that I was struggling through in my undergrad work; I was having a rough time keeping up with the vocabulary. Incredibly, I found an HC stack for Greek vocabulary drills that followed the same book we were using, written by a grad student at some other university. The author was not a programmer, and I think that it was safe to say that he never would have attempted something like that in BASIC. This was purely a work of the community that would not have existed otherwise.
In fact, I ended up authoring my own stack for Hebrew that gave a basic introduction to the language, did vocabulary drills, and even spoke the vocabulary aloud using MacinTalk. Not being a programmer, I wouln't have known where to begin to author something like that without HC.
Sure, there are better tools out there today for doing snazzier stuff; there were a lot of more advanced tools during HC's days, too. But what made HC a killer app for the masses was both its accesibility and its flexibility. And of course the fact that it came free on every Mac.
Not coincidentally, HC came onto the market just as Microsoft was starting to put some distance between PC's and Mac's. The biggest argument for buying a PC (then and now) was, "The PC has thousands more apps available!" I think Bill Atkinson realized that putting a tool like HC in the hands of the average Mac user just completely deflated that argument. For almost any category you could imagine, if you couldn't find a commercial app to suit your needs, the chances were good that someone had already written an HC stack to fill the void. Or, it wasn't such an outrageous proposition to think that you could write one yourself.
And therein lies another missed opportunity for Apple; creating a community of coders for the Mac. The Apple ][ had a very long life, I believe, because there was always a strong emphasis on programming it, and that emphasis gave rise to commercial authors who grew the software base. The Mac floundered in the mid 80's because Steve Jobs made it difficult to become a Mac developer; in 1984, you had to fill out an application and be approved before Apple would sell you their development kit (and don't even dare to suggest that you wanted to write games). Not surprisingly, Mac software development got off to a slow start.
HC could have done for the Mac what AppleSoft BASIC did for the Apple ][. Created a community of "amateur" developers that would go on to become loyal, professional Mac developers. But unfortunately, CEO's Gil Ameilo and Jobs got all hung up on the fact that Apple giving HC away, rather than viewing it as an investment in the platform's future.
HyperCard, as it now exists, is dead. I stopped using it years ago because its development path was just pathetic (e.g., the way color was handled was just totally bizarre). The app is dead, but the market it addressed still exists, perhaps now more than ever. If Apple would rewrite HC from the ground up, rebrand it, and GIVE IT AWAY (while still selling add-on packs, books, support, classes, etc.), they would have a tremendous investment in the Mac's future.
Apparently, Jobs now understands the value of giving away apps, because he's giving away frivilous stuff like iTunes and iMovie (I say "frivilous" because, cool as they may be, they won't have the lasting impact that a consumer-level development tool would have). Now if only he could be convinced to see the long-term impact a new version of HC could have...
That's great, but obviously the court didn't think that the site was part of some greater conspiracy. What we have is a very large segment of people who believe that abortion is wrong, and like any large group, there are people who take their beliefs to the extreme.
It's unfortunate that we don't have any expert legal opinions weighing in here. I hate when Slashdot runs a story like this and opinions are flying all over the place but nobody seems concerned that they don't know the specifics of the case.
Before anyone goes spouting off here, maybe a discussion of the RICO laws is in order by one of our resident lawyers.
My understanding is that the RICO laws were passed with the express purpose of attacking organized crime, i.e., the Mafia, and were never intended to be used to attack protesters in this way. Using the RICO laws against protesters would ultimately have a chilling effect on Free Speech. So, whatever else they may be guilty of, dismissal of the RICO charges may have been a good thing.
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So, I'm a little foggy on this...what exactly is it that they own? All of this data is public information, anyone can pull up CD's on Amazon and copy all of the song info. The only difference is that Gracenote has actually paid people to enter this data.
If I pay someone a large amount of money to type in the King James Version of the Bible to post on my website, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that some else downloaded all of my files and posted them on their website, do I have any legal recourse? I would assume not.
Please note, I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on TV.
Here's the message I posted to their board. Since there are 9,000 messages there, and you can only read 5 at a time, it's unlikely to be read there...
Anyway, from a marketing perspective, they want to increase sales for their cards by giving us this unique feature.
From a gamers perspective, those who buy the cards will have a blast with them, and those who don't use Asus cards will constantly be pissed off at the number of cheaters in the game, and this will ultimately result in many online games becoming closed and password-protected, making it very hard for many honest players to find an open, fair game.
From the game developer's POV, this is ultimately detrimental to their market. They want as many people as possible to have a positive experience playing their games, the way the game was intended to be played. They will ultimately view Asus as a threat to their market, and many if not most developers will intentionally make their games incompatible with Asus cards, and will print on the box "DOES NOT WORK WITH ASUS CARDS". The end result is that Asus will lose marketshare, because the most popular games are incompatible with their cards.
Is that what they want?
I would agree with you that the games are probably a waste of engineering effort, but only because they are crappy games. On a related note, I think M$ missed the boat by releasing Ultimate TV and X-Box as two separate products. They should have had a low-end version of X-Box that only played games, and a high end version that did games, TV recording, DVD player, web surfing, email, and MP3's. Instead of proprietary ports, they should have used USB and FireWire, so you could plug in standard PC peripherals. Sure, it would have been a tough to sell one device in two markets, but I think they could have pulled it off.
On the upside, maybe Nokia's efforts will help push the industries towards convergence, so that we don't have 20 separate devices hanging off our TV's.
There is definitely more to this story than we are being told by this kid. Granted, there's more than a few pointy-headed school administrators in this country, but a 5-day suspension for unwittingly sending an oversized email sounds way too severe.
From a marketing standpoint, that's probably the LAST thing Apple should do; they would be diluting the Mac OS brand. Apple just spent hundreds of millions to bring its users a Mac-ified version of *nix; actively supporting Linux would only raise questions about Apple's commitment to OS X, and it might even slow development of OS X apps. No, Apple has the right idea: encouraging *nix users who are ready for a decent GUI to make the permanent switch to OS X, and pushing OS X as a better enterprise server OS.
Besides, assuming they did promote Linux on the PPC, Apple can't guarantee that all of those Linux/PPC users would be return hardware customers; once Apple established the market, other vendors like Dell and Gateway would start producing Linux/PPC systems based on the already established CHRP specs, and margins would get slashed to pennies on the dollar overnight. Since Apple has already demonstrated that they can't compete in a cut-throat market like that, they would be forced to exit. At least by promoting OS X, Apple can maintain user loyalty and repeat hardware purchases.
Anyway, Apple already has an open source OS in Darwin. If Apple ever did decide to tackle the internet appliance market, they would do it with Darwin.
Caveat emptor...
Not necessarily. If someone buys your site, then obviously they already have some ideas on how to grow revenue with it. After all, no savvy business person would spend money on an established venture without first doing an audit of the books, the business model, etc. Selling the site could be a way to grow the brand by putting it in more capable marketing hands.
"What's Bob reading over there at his desk? Is that a porn site?"
"No, it's a tech site...I'm just reading the articles--REALLY!"
That's because he took the precautionary step of buying the city before he spray painted the sidewalk.
Well, apparently the tip-off that it wasn't a local SF gang was that they used black instead of flamingo pink...
Dvorak was the "Anti-Editor" for Mac User in the 80's; he had the column on the last page. His shtick was to bash the Mac every month.
I remember reading this kind of stuff from him in MacUser back around '84.
Yes, they ripped him off by making him the company president and the chief technology officer. I hate it when that happens to me...
To look at the other side of the coin, these investors put up a lot of money. My understanding is that the code base became the property of the corporation, and Hinkley lost control of it because he could be outvoted 5 to 1 in board meetings. From the investors' point of view, they bankrolled the operation, and they didn't want some kid to leave with the crown jewels of the organization on a whim. I can understand that.
As I said in another post, I've followed the Hotline story, and everyone paints Adam's side, but I always see the red flags going up. Something tells me that this kid is a hothead, to expect that at 17 or 18, his investors are going to let him do as he pleases with the company. They probably did have him on a string, but only because he alowed himself to be put there.
I mean, really -- would anyone here take seriously a company president who accidentally signed away all his IP rights because he didn't know any better?
I don't think that that's what happened. On his last day as president of the company, Adam took down the web servers, encrypted the code base, and left with a copy of the code burned to CD. The owners immediately filed several suits against him, and had the police raid his home. Adam was facing jail time and stiff fines, so he relented and unlocked the code.
I've followed the story of Hinkley and Hotline over the last few years, and it seems that the whole story has not been said. Hinkley always talks about getting burned, and certainly there were some emotional stand-offs with his company exec's. However, according to this rather detailed account of Hinkley's struggles, his former boss says that he would very much like to have Hinkley back.
Let's be practical...it makes no business sense to rob your star programmer blind and show him the door. Sure, his investors secured the rights to the code in a draconian fashion, but they went to the extrodianry step of making this teenager the president of the company. Something tells me that Adam realized got ticked off when he realized he turned over all property rights, and the friction probably grew when he found out that these seasoned businessmen were treating this teenager as president in name only. I can't say as I entirely blame them, although they shouldn't have made him president in the first place. It was obviously just a tactic to try to keep him onboard.
I wish the kid the best and hope he finds the success he deserves, but frankly, it seems that there has yet to be an account written by an objective 3rd party who can tell us how much of the problem was Hinkley's youth and business inexperience. Signing away all IP rights was pretty naive for a "company president".
OS X doesn't run on top of OS 9; the other way around. When you launch the first Classic app, OS 9 boots up as a process within OS X. This allows OS 9 to take advantage of some features, like improved virtual memory and, I believe, improved multitasking. Also, the Classic environment can still crash, but it won't bring down OS X.
For the most part, OS 9 is invisible to the user. Apple has designed it to be unobtrusive. When you launch a Classic app, it behaves for the most part like any other app.
The reason is simple... OS 9 runs inside of OS X to provide support for legacy apps. This was Apple's plan from the start.
Well, two things. One, OS X may be missing a few minor things, but other than that it's a fully functional OS. I'm using it right now. It just doesn't have all the spit and polish Apple wanted to give it for the launch.
And two, when you figure that an OS 9.1 CD is included (a $99 retail value), you're basically getting OS X for $30. Not a bad deal.
Personally, I'm glad they shipped it. Have you used it?
There's a reason for that... Apple acknowledges that OS X is still missing a few key features, like DVD and CDRW support. Right now, OS X is only for the early adopters.
According to the rumor sites, Apple is going to wait until MWNY this summer to do the big advertising campaign on OS X. That's when it will start shipping pre-installed on all Apple systems, and when most of the major software vendors are going to sell OS X versions of their apps.
Bravo...this article is a cheap shot on the Republicans disguised as an April Fool's joke.
How can you even *say* this? Where's Be's counterpart for the Interface Builder or Project Builder? I doubt their API could hold a candle to OpenStep. Can you honestly say you would rather use C++ than Objective C?
Not to mention the fact that BeOS was still in "beta" at the time, and was missing a lot of hardware support. Gasse was playing a bit of a confidence game, he kept raising the price because he thought he had Apple over a barrel.
OTOH, OpenStep was a shipping, mature, proven OS. And it had the PR benefit of bringing prodigal son Steve Jobs back to Apple.
Gasse should have taken the money and run. He has nobody to kick in the butt now but himself.
The mac veterns will miss it but don't bring obsolete software or an emulator to run HYPERCARD to OS X. In its current form, yes. It really needs a total rewrite, otherwise Apple will be wasting their time carbonizing it. The last version of HC is now hopelessly outdated.
It's hard to quantify the amount of value that HyperCard added to the Mac. Most people who use computers are not so übergeek that they want to dive into C++, Perl, Java, etc.; just the opposite.
HyperCard offered (for the first time and, perhaps, the last) a development environment that the average person could understand and work with, giving immeasurable power to the user community. That sounds like a pretty heady statement, but it's true. A somewhat small case-in-point was a Greek class that I was struggling through in my undergrad work; I was having a rough time keeping up with the vocabulary. Incredibly, I found an HC stack for Greek vocabulary drills that followed the same book we were using, written by a grad student at some other university. The author was not a programmer, and I think that it was safe to say that he never would have attempted something like that in BASIC. This was purely a work of the community that would not have existed otherwise.
In fact, I ended up authoring my own stack for Hebrew that gave a basic introduction to the language, did vocabulary drills, and even spoke the vocabulary aloud using MacinTalk. Not being a programmer, I wouln't have known where to begin to author something like that without HC.
Sure, there are better tools out there today for doing snazzier stuff; there were a lot of more advanced tools during HC's days, too. But what made HC a killer app for the masses was both its accesibility and its flexibility. And of course the fact that it came free on every Mac.
Not coincidentally, HC came onto the market just as Microsoft was starting to put some distance between PC's and Mac's. The biggest argument for buying a PC (then and now) was, "The PC has thousands more apps available!" I think Bill Atkinson realized that putting a tool like HC in the hands of the average Mac user just completely deflated that argument. For almost any category you could imagine, if you couldn't find a commercial app to suit your needs, the chances were good that someone had already written an HC stack to fill the void. Or, it wasn't such an outrageous proposition to think that you could write one yourself.
And therein lies another missed opportunity for Apple; creating a community of coders for the Mac. The Apple ][ had a very long life, I believe, because there was always a strong emphasis on programming it, and that emphasis gave rise to commercial authors who grew the software base. The Mac floundered in the mid 80's because Steve Jobs made it difficult to become a Mac developer; in 1984, you had to fill out an application and be approved before Apple would sell you their development kit (and don't even dare to suggest that you wanted to write games). Not surprisingly, Mac software development got off to a slow start.
HC could have done for the Mac what AppleSoft BASIC did for the Apple ][. Created a community of "amateur" developers that would go on to become loyal, professional Mac developers. But unfortunately, CEO's Gil Ameilo and Jobs got all hung up on the fact that Apple giving HC away, rather than viewing it as an investment in the platform's future.
HyperCard, as it now exists, is dead. I stopped using it years ago because its development path was just pathetic (e.g., the way color was handled was just totally bizarre). The app is dead, but the market it addressed still exists, perhaps now more than ever. If Apple would rewrite HC from the ground up, rebrand it, and GIVE IT AWAY (while still selling add-on packs, books, support, classes, etc.), they would have a tremendous investment in the Mac's future.
Apparently, Jobs now understands the value of giving away apps, because he's giving away frivilous stuff like iTunes and iMovie (I say "frivilous" because, cool as they may be, they won't have the lasting impact that a consumer-level development tool would have). Now if only he could be convinced to see the long-term impact a new version of HC could have...
That's great, but obviously the court didn't think that the site was part of some greater conspiracy. What we have is a very large segment of people who believe that abortion is wrong, and like any large group, there are people who take their beliefs to the extreme.
It's unfortunate that we don't have any expert legal opinions weighing in here. I hate when Slashdot runs a story like this and opinions are flying all over the place but nobody seems concerned that they don't know the specifics of the case.
Before anyone goes spouting off here, maybe a discussion of the RICO laws is in order by one of our resident lawyers.
My understanding is that the RICO laws were passed with the express purpose of attacking organized crime, i.e., the Mafia, and were never intended to be used to attack protesters in this way. Using the RICO laws against protesters would ultimately have a chilling effect on Free Speech. So, whatever else they may be guilty of, dismissal of the RICO charges may have been a good thing.