legal threats

We've argued for years that stricter enforcement doesn't stop "piracy," no matter how many times industry folks and politicians insist it otherwise.

There's been some recent new empirical evidence that enforcement doesn't work, from the massive SSRC report, but still politicians and industry folks seem to think enforcement is the only way forward.

Phil of Make Magazine has composed a top-seven list of Sony's most egregious abuses of the law to attack gear hackers/innovators.

Phil starts with Sony's legal threats against security researchers who discovered that Sony-BMG had deliberately (and illegally) infected millions of computers with a rootkit as part of a DRM scheme, and goes all the way through to the latest round of PS3 action.

The actual story behind this is a few years old, but it was just retold in a recent video by a social media person at NPR, about how the broadcaster got control over their Facebook fan page that had been set up by a fan: Basically, this guy -- Geoff Campbell -- noticed that NPR didn't have a Facebook fan page.

ZDNet: "In a statement to our sister site Gamespot, Microsoft has backed down from its legal threats against the Kinect Linux “hack” of Hector Martin."

Nicely timed at the start of the new college year, a new BitTorrent site dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks has surfaced.

Torrent My Book - a project run by two college students - aims to become the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, following in the footsteps of the late TextBookTorrents.

At the start of the college year in 2008 tens of thousands of students were flocking to TextBookTorrents.

Their goal? To save hundreds of dollars on expensive books.

You may recall late last year the legal threats that came down after some designers started discussing the possibility that a Demi Moore photo on the cover of W magazine may have been Photoshopped in an odd way.

The lawyers came out and threatened those who were talking about it, leading the story to get much more attention (as per usual).

Softpedia: "Raoul Chiesa, a renowned European security expert, was forced to cancel his presentation at the Hack in the Box (HITB) Security Conference after legal threats from ATM vendors.

He was supposed to present the results of years of research into the underground economy."

Nearly five years ago, we wrote about how some fans of the video game King's Quest, of which there hadn't been an official release in years, had decided to put together a fan-created version.

Vivendi, who owned the rights to the game, initially sent in the lawyers with a cease-and-desist, but later backed down, and gave the go ahead, so long as the name of the game was The Silver Lining, rather than King's Quest IX.

As part of NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's grandstanding against child porn, he's mostly been making silly threats against the wrong parties in ways that don't actually help stop child porn (and could make it worse).

However, his latest announcement actually sounds a lot more reasonable.

There are people out there who believe that just talking about the fact that infringing content is out there is infringing itself, but that seems like a plainly ridiculous standard for judging infringing content.

Yet, we see cases like this all the time.