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Re: your mail



On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 10:16:12AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:31:02PM -0800, D. Starner wrote:
> > > Also, in any sane legal
> > > system, it should only affect those users who willingly violate the licence,
> > > even after a cease-and-desist letter, and i would say they deserve what they
> > > get.
> > 
> > In any sane legal system, the judge is going to find out what's going 
> > on from both sides before he even considers dismissing the case. That 
> 
> Ok, but we are in the case where the defendor is innocent, right ? 

So?  The cost of defending against the suit is still considerable.  And
there is no guarantee of being awarded costs even for a frivolous lawsuit,
let alone collecting.

> > means that the user has to hire a French lawyer to write a response to
> > the statement of cause. Unless the judges are omniscient, that's what
> > has to happen.
> 
> What exactly is stopping him from hiring a local lawyer to write the statement
> and sent it per letter to the judge, and how will it differ from the case
> where the court of venue is local to him ? The choice of law is the french law
> in both case.

It's still very costly.  Here's an example from the US:
http://mainsleazespam.com/law/ema.html

Whilst this is America, home of the bullshit lawsuit, I contend that
something substantively similar could happen basically anywhere.  It
happened in Australia, too, again around the issue of spam, and I think
there's been a similar case or two in Europe somewhere.

> > And let's be honest; a court case may look obvious to us, but few 
> > judges have ever had a case where an open-sourceish license is 
> 
> Well, but a tentative to repeteadly harass using lawsuits will probably not be
> missed by a judge.

s/tentative/tendency/?  Possibly not, but it's not hard to identify this
sort of thing if the suits don't come before the same judge.

- Matt



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