Re: implications of recent legal trends

[shafik () acm poly edu (Shafik Yaghmour)]

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On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Stuart Staniford-Chen wrote:

> > Meanwhile, the ACLU is representing three people who mirrored 
> > cphack, a utility that allows users to bypass the Cyber Patrol 
> > web filtering program and to view its secret list of blocked 
> > sites. That case ended in a settlement when cphack's authors 
> > agreed to transfer ownership of the program to plaintiff Mattel,
> > owner of Cyber Patrol. A federal judge in Boston issued a 
> > permanent injunction in the case barring anyone "in concert" 
> > with the program's authors from mirroring the program, and the 
> > ACLU announced Wednesday it was appealing that decision to the 
> > 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
>
> I don't know any more about the case than that.  It was settled so it
> isn't legal precedent.  But presumably the ACLU wouldn't have given in
> unless they thought the case looked pretty bad for their clients.

        Well what really happened was that they choose to settle without
telling thier lawyers, they found out about the same time the judge did.
The ACLU from what I know thought they had a good case but obviously they
can't force the defendants to not settle because it is their butts on the
lines not the lawyers. Basically they decided that they didn't want to
take the chance they could lose the case and face criminal penalties.

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