FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 18:05:31 -0600 To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: CyberPatrol brawl gets ugly and international, from CNN Send reply to: declan@well.com
I just got back from Dallas -- only to learn from a reporter who phoned me that Mattel hasn't given up. Their lawyer is sending me a physical subpoena via registered mail (and here I was hoping to get served in person!).
Thanks, everyone, for the offers of legal and moral support. I'll keep y'all informed about what happens now.
-Declan
http://cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/cyberpatrol.decoder/
Cyber Patrol decoding brawl gets ugly and international March 21, 2000
By Richard Stenger CNN Interactive Writer
FRAMINGHAM, Massachusetts (CNN) -- A legal dispute between a U.S. toymaker that produces a popular Internet pornography filter and two programmers that decoded the software could heat up into a messy international brawl.
A subsidiary of Mattel Inc. won a court order Friday requiring Eddy Jansson of Sweden and Matthew Skala of Canada to stop distributing a method to bypass its Cyber Patrol filtering software. Now the company is going after mirror sites that posted the "cphack" decoding program, and anyone who downloaded it.
[...]
Targeting mirror sites, downloaders
Microsystems' lawyers are also now looking for anyone who downloaded cphack, according to Declan McCullagh, a journalist and computer expert who received an electronic subpoena from a lawyer representing Cyber Patrol.
"Mattel attorneys are bulk-mailing anyone who even linked to the cphack code and telling them the order applies to them too. They're also sending out subpoenas, frantically trying to find out who downloaded copies," he said in an email on Sunday.
McCullagh said he never mirrored the cphack utility, but did post the addresses of mirror sites to Politechbot, his Web site about politics and technology that includes a moderated mailing list.
"Naturally I have no intention of revealing the identities of politech readers to Mattel or anyone else. Nor is a subpoena sent via email usually viewed as proper service, at least where I come from," he wrote.
Sydney Rubin, a Cyber Patrol spokesperson, downplayed Mccullagh's charge. "The court gave us the ability to [locate those who downloaded the program] but I don't think we will. We will do only what is absolutely necessary to take this [utility] down," she said.
But Schwartz, in an email to McCullagh, writes: "I have included a subpoena to you that requires you to disclose the log of persons who downloaded either 'CP4break.zip' and/or "cphack.exe'."
[...]
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