Thursday, February 6, 2003

Disney asserts Deep Pooh evidence was illegally gathered Disney has countered claims that it enroned twenty boxes of documents pertaining to the merchandising rights to Winnie the Pooh by showing evidence that AA Milne's agent's heirs (who assert that they own the rights in perpetuity) acquired their most damning evidence by digging through Disney's trash and sneaking into Disney offices. Huh? How is this a defense? "Sure, we destroyed documents that were harmful to our case that the other side has brought forward, but they acquired the illegally destroyed documents by nefarious means!" [Boing Boing Blog] 3:13:33 AM

Poll on Lexmark's rotten business practices and DMCA bullying Remember Lexmark's bullshit DMCA suit against a little company that makes Lexmark-compatible printer supplies? Lexmark asserts that reverse-engineering the signing key in its toner carts is circumventing the DRM it uses to control access to its copyrighted printer OS, and that no one should be able to make interoperable cartridges except Lexmark. [Boing Boing Blog] Not sure I agree that Lexmark shouldn't have the right to prevent people from making cartridges for their printer. But it's unbelievably stupid of Lexmark to want that, or what's happening to them now. God knows, I'll never buy a Lexmark printer! 3:04:11 AM

PacBell and Scientology knock Kevin Burton offline Kevin Burton's mirror of xenu.net's samizdata about the Church of Scientology generated a DMCA takedown notice -- a legal notice that requires his ISP to remove the material and then ask him if he disputes that it is infringing, and if he does, to put it back up. PacBell sent Kevin email to a dead account and then disconnected his $180/month "business" DSL account. To add insult to injury, PacBell (Kevin's ISP) had no mechanism for reinstating his account and gave him days of runaround. [Boing Boing Blog] That a sick cult like Scientology can use the DMCA to silence its critics is bad enough, but what really galls me is that they can wrap themselves in the cloak of "religion", and people buy it. In Germany Scientology is treated as the dangerous cult that it is. I don't know what their litmus test is for cult vs. religion, but certainly their categorization is correct for Scientology. 2:48:39 AM

© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.