🚀 go-pugleaf

sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
>In article <21059@skye.dcs.ed.ac.uk> cc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Chris Cooke) writes:
>>Terrorists murder people.  They do it very messily.  Arms, legs, heads,
>>intestines, part company from each other and fly all over the street.
>>I'm not aware that Apple Computer does this sort of thing.  Grow up.

>Grow up.  Terrorists cause terror.  That's why they're called "terrorists."
>You've heard of "ecoterrorists," I assume?  Guess what:  they don't kill
>people (except indirectly or accidently).  "Legal terrorists" don't kill
>people, either (except indirectly or accidently):  they just cause terror
>through legal means.  Such as threatening to sue anyone they can.

Avoiding the thorny politics of ecoterrorism, the point here is
apparently that anyone who uses the legal system as a means to protect
their rights is a "Legal Terrorist". Fine, I can deal with that
particular twisting of the language (I like a good Humpty-Dumpty-ism as
much as the next guy). Just make sure you lump IBM, HP, DEC, Atari,
NeXT, MIT, AT&T, and, yes, our good friends the FSF, into the category
of legal terrorists, since all of them threaten to sue you if you
violate some of their rights. You might want to remove Apple, though;
they certainly don't seem to be threating to sue anyone they can (two
companies out of at least a dozen potential targets doesn't seem like
"anyone they can" to me...).

Of course, they may or may not have those rights; it is, in general,
difficult to tell if they do until a test case is filed. Do you believe
that you should only sue in cases where the law is clear and well
defined? That attitude would make the product-liability cases in the
early '80's, the consumer-protection cases in the 60's and 70's, and
most of negligence law from this century into acts of "Legal
Terrorism"; those rights weren't even as defined as user-interface
copyright (instead of a vacuum, the law specifically disallowed
recovery in these cases) at the time the courts reversed themselves.
Roe v. Wade was, of course, an example of Roe "terrorizing' the legal
system, as were Gideon v. Wainright, Brown v. Board of Education, etc.

--John

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John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1991 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well.