[thelist] lawyer madness

just another STUPID lawyer trick...What world do we
live in ? how hard will it be for us to work in the
future ? Hell, i'm happy not to live in the U.S. near
these lawyers, but extra-territoriality seems akward
(see e-toy)
Found on a list apart

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/outside/

'Bobbi wrote to us after an attorney had sent a
threatening letter regarding her small, non-corporate
educational site. Had Bobbi published copyrighted
materials or violated some company's trademark? Nope.
Are you sitting down? Of course you are. The lawyer
was telling Bobbi she was  legally obliged to change
the name of one of her site's subdirectories. '
...
'One of Bobbi's pages is a directory of educational
resources online, so she named that directory
"onlineed" (short for online education). 
As it happens, onlineed.com is the domain name of a
company that provides online educational resources. 
Well, it must have been a slow day in the legal
department at onlineed.com, so an attorney for that
company went trolling for "trademark violations," and
a search engine delivered him to Bobbi's site. The
attorney sent Bobbi a note "requesting" that she
rename her subdirectory. Of course, when a lawyer
sends a note that begins "onlineEd is registered with
the United States Patent and Trademark Office" and
ends with a "request" that you take some action, most
of us will correctly interpret that "request" as a
threat. '

it is interesting (...well frightening) to know that
all the patent buzz is NOTHING compared to what we are
going to see. As told in the New York Times (dec 22,
article non-linkable, not free of charge :( ), patents
take 2 to 5 years to become effective. 
So, stupid patents as LinkShare's (
http://www.linkshare.com/press/patent.html , patenting
affiliate services) or Amazon's are just signs of the
things to come...Maybe someone get a patent for using
switchable Dhtml layers to provide info, a patent for
archive urls...

What a mess. Thinks i'm going to change job...Maybe
i'll get a farm (is there a patent on farming ?).

<tip type="urlotd">
http://webfx.eae.net/main.html

power-up your dhtml
</tip>

=====
Benjamin Deboute 
Info/systems architecture, webdesign/ergonomie

diary :: http://deboute.diaryland.com  
weblog :: http://www.gunillakarlzen.com/deboute/blog/blogger.html
www.evolt.org :: the best looking developers list. 
www.wasp.org :: fight for webstandarts
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com