[humorix] If You're Reading This, Prepare To Get Sued

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

----
Warning:  humorous content ahead.
To prevent overdosage for the sensitive readers, please
take your discussions to humorix-l@nl.linux.org...
----

If You're Reading This, Prepare To Get Sued
Timm Murray, admin@madtimes.com
February 13, 2001

We need money fast.  Two years ago we had to shoo Venture
Capitalists off our property with cattle prods.  But
nowadays, thanks to the Dotcom Downtown, the flow of free
money has dried up.  We can no longer maintain the standard
of living that we have become accustomed to -- no more
Faberge-Egg-Of-The-Month Club, no more New Ferrari Fridays,
no more 512-node Beowulf Clusters for every employee.

While our Plan A ("mooching off of Venture Capitalists")
has failed, we do have a Plan B ("file lawsuits against
everybody in sight").  Hey, all the other struggling
dotcoms are doing it.  Our legal counsel, Mr. Noah Morals,
Esq., has concocted a way to raise money quick -- and we'll
get some bonus evil points for using the DMCA to do it!

According to the DMCA:

   A technological measure 'effectively controls access to
   a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its
   operation, requires the application of information, or a
   process or a treatment, with the authority of the
   copyright owner, to gain access to the work[1].

Since it clearly does not state that the access control
measure be of any strength, plain old ASCII falls under the
above definition.  Since your computer had to decode the
ASCII sequence to put this on your computer screen (and did
so without our explicit permission), you are now in
violation of the DMCA (Direct Money Capturing Act).

You might say that just because we posted it to our
publicly accessible mailing list, that gives you permission
to decode it. Not so, says Noah Morals.  According to him,
that's only _implicit_ permission, not explicit. Ha ha,
suckers.

"This should put a stop to all those pirates who blatently
decrypt our stories!" he said. "This was costing us tens of
dollars a year.  It's good to know that the horror is
finally over... Now if you'll excuse me, I have a
once-in-a-lifetime invitation to have lunch with my heros,
Jeff Bezos and David Wetherell[2]."


[1] ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/cp105/hr796.txt
[2] http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/17/1534254.shtml
-
Humorix:      Linux and Open Source(nontm) on a lighter note
Archive:      http://humbolt.nl.linux.org/lists/
Web site:     http://www.i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/