How often are legal threats used to silence Internet activity? Help us to find out and counter baseless threats with the "chilling effects clearinghouse." Harvard Cyber Law and the EFF combine forces to get a handle on over-zealous cease-and-desist orders issued over websites. Mattel has been so active in this area that they became the butt of jokes about it. Hopefully stupid stuff like this will start decreasing, or at least, there will be a group you can contact when you need support against these types of actions.
posted by mathowie on Jul 26, 2001 - 5 comments

WTF!?! Everyone's favorite band (back in high school) Metallica is suing Napster and a handful of universities for unlawful trading of their music. This is ridiculous, and I hope it doesn't set a precedence. If anyone would just slap a revenue model on napster so artists could get paid for their work, none of this piracy crap would happen. And Metallica, what about the other apps that do the same thing, are you going to sue them too? And what about every other band on earth? What do you expect to get out of universities, tighter controls over bandwidth, or student monitoring of internet usage? What about every cable modem and DSL provider that lets people use Napster, are you going after them too? Why don't you sue everyone on earth that's heard your songs but didn't pay for them? Side question: Is it better to burn out or fade away?
posted by mathowie on Apr 13, 2000 - 17 comments