USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010825.1150 (On Screen): Our legal system treats us equally and grants us justice. It says here. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work that way. The problem is that appeariing in court is immensely expensive. If you are sued, you might prevail but be financially ruined by legal fees. If two litigants have approximately equal levels of wealth, then the situation is still fair, because the plaintiff will equally be ruined, so he won't go to court unless he thinks his case is just.

But what is expensive for one man may be cheap for another man -- or for a corporation. And the corporations know this, which means that they can often prevail in a conflict simply by threatening legal action. I have seen many time online a note from someone running a web site that says "We took this down because thus-and-so corporation threatened us with a lawsuit and we can't afford to defend ourselves. We believe we had a right to post that information but we don't want to be ruined." None of this is a mystery, and corporations have been doing this for quite some time.

But occasionally it backfires. For instance, the SDMI sent a letter to Professor Felten threatening him with a civil suit and with criminal prosecution if he were to present a paper he had written demonstrating how easy it was to defeat all the proposed methods of digitally watermarking music. Felten turned the tables nicely on them by publicizing the fact, causing SDMI to backtrack rapidly and to claim disingenuously that he had misinterpreted the letter: it wasn't a threat, it was just friendly advice. They wouldn't dream of actually suing their good friend Professor Felten, who was like a brother to them, and so on. Yeah, right.

And now we've got another example of that. First off, this is particularly egregious, because the lawyer in question misunderstood the situation. The lawyer seems to have noticed that using the URL http://yahoo.sex.com would connect to the site "sex.com", which contains a bazillion links to other sex sites. "They're abusing our trademark. Stop this instant." Actually, no. Sex.com is using a wildcard domain, as do most sites. The left hand word doesn't matter; whatever it is, it's going to connect there. oatmeal.sex.com would have done the same thing. (Now that's kinky.) My server is also set up that way: yahoo.denbeste.nu works just fine (and connects to me, not to Yahoo). But rather than actually consult someone who understood how the Internet worked, this lawyer hit the word processor and fired off a threatening letter.

But the guy who owns "sex.com" is no stranger to litigation, having had the domain stolen from him and having successfully sued to recover it. And he didn't back down. He has counter-sued Yahoo and is about to try to cause Yahoo as much legal grief as he possibly can. And the whole episode is becoming a singificant public relations gaff to Yahoo. Though I have my doubts about some of his claims, I hope he prevails in this. If so, it may just restrain the next corporate lawyer who feels the urge to try to intimidate someone with a threat of a lawsuit. We ants are not necessarily totally helpless against the corporate elephants. When we receive such threats, we can go public and try to make them look like blundering bullies, as was the case this time. (discussion in progress)

Update: One of Gary Kremen's comments about Yahoo was that it was tolerating a message board called http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/looklikeaminor. I got curious and loaded it, and there it was. So I followed a message link and was told "no such message", and went back to the main page and was told that the board had been deleted. It happened as I was looking at it. Yahoo is clearly in full retreat here. But they've demonstrate in the past that they have no spine.