Build Date: Fri Jul 11 11:50:38 2025 UTC
Subliminal messages inserted into Muzak may not work, but they've cranked them up at a couple of local stores in my area. I walk in the door and my head starts to buzz and my skin starts to crawl. Then again, maybe that's just my reaction to American consumer culture.
-- Baron Earl
The Chilling Effects of Legal Threats
2002-01-07 19:04:40
After 7 or 8 years of this World Wide Web thing, we've all come to know the story: a great piece of art, of news reporting, of critique or of satire goes up on the Web somewhere. It gets hits, it gets kudos, it gets involvement from the world. And then, one day, it's gone. Why? Where'd it go?
More often than not, there's a pathetic little page linked in where the piece used to be, along the lines of,
I got a cease-and-desist letter today from [name of Bad Guy here]. I think I have a pretty legitimate case, but they're bigger, they're richer, and they've got more lawyers than they know what to do with. I'm just a guy/girl with a computer and an idea. I can't fight them. I'm sorry, but I had to take the site down. Thanks to everyone who enjoyed it.
It's always a heartbreaker to see this. The mind reels -- couldn't they have fought it? Couldn't they have stood up? If we all bend like this, won't they take us out one by one? Am -- uh -- am I next?
The Web has been really spectacular in allowing practically ANYONE with sufficient skillz to publish their dream work. But the flipside of that opportunity to publish is that Web publishers tend to have far less experience with legal issues, and access to legal resources, than traditional publishing powerhouses. We're divided and isolated. Face it: we're easy pickings.
That's why I'm pretty excited about the new project from a coalition of cyberlaw organizations called Chilling Effects. The point of the project is to document and track legal threats against Web publishers and their ilk, with the hope of developing strategies for small publishers to deal with these type of threats.
Maybe with Chilling Effects starting to catch some steam, we'll see a time in the not-so-distant future where First Amendment rights of free expression and a free press are protected on the Internet, instead of squelched de facto by legal teams with too much money and time on their hands -- and too much to lose from letting the truth be told.
T O P S T O R I E S
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Poor Metallica. All they want is to continue to put out the same weak "Heavy Metal" they've been churning out since the "And Justice For All" days? and make gooey wads of cash in the process. The problem is, people aren't buying their bound for the heavy metal scrap heap, over-produced, uninspired, tired crap. And let's face it, their various commercial endorsements won't pay for the lifestyle they've become comfortably accustomed to. Resorting to lawsuits makes perfect sense, when you need spending money. But just one lawsuit isn't going to pay their bills. So, to aid Metallica, I've composed an open letter to the boys in the band, with suggestions as to whom else they might sic their lapdog lawyers on... (More...)
The Walken / Country Bear Conspiracy
As has been recently reported in the PDJ, Christopher Walken, evil s00per villain extraordinaire, will be appearing next month in Disney's newest release, The Country Bear Movie. Always playing some wicked and very disturbed badass in movies like Sleepy Hollow, Illuminata, The Prophecy I, II, III, Pulp Fiction, Batman Returns, The Milagro Beanfield War, A View to a Kill, The Dogs of War, Heaven's Gate, and The Deer Hunter, Walken is unsuprisingly a big favorite in the PDJ news room. (More...)
It was early in May last year when I first heard about Spock Mountain Research Labs. I was working on a story about a Hungarian scientist's new approach to nucleopeptide synthesis when I got a call from my friend Albert. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
So I was walking around the Tenderloin looking for stray twenty-dollar-bills that might have fallen into gutters, and I was thinking, as I often do, about my mother. (More...)