DISQUS

Plagiarism Today: Saturday Linkroll: Slower Week

  • Recording Studio · 1 year ago
    The best buy apology letter takes me back to my corporate days. Before I got involved in out IP management work, a retired colonel was looking after the department as part of "Internal Security" matters. That was the importance given to the matter!!

    He had to show that he was on the ball, by sending weekly reports of all that he had done during the week to HO. He used to send off all kinds of letters to various people on IP matters and list those letters as his performance report.

    I wonder if this was what happened at Best Buy!!
  • JB · 1 year ago
    RS: It is impossible to say but I'm pretty sure if I shook my Magic Eight Ball it'd say "Signs Point to Yes".

    This whole thing reeks of an overzealous attorney trying to justify his existence at the company and sending out cease and desist letters that are neither necessary nor proper.

    Sadly, that's the nature of corporate law. You hire a bunch of attorneys and they scramble to earn their keep any way they can. If they get into a bit of downtime, which one would expect this time of year, they often get into some trouble.

    I would tell the guy to work for an insurance company, their lawyers are never bored.

    With that being said, you had a corporation hire a retired colonel to handle "internal security"? That seems a bit extreme to me. To find out he was handling IP matters, that just seems clinically insane.

    I won't ask what company you were working for, but I have to ask if they were in a line of business that justified this...
  • Jeremy Steele · 1 year ago
    Not sure if you read digg or not - but that "ISP gave data to NBC" story is being marked inaccurate like crazy. It seems like what happened is NBC hired a company to track some of the files and snatched IPs that attempt to download them - then report it to NBC who send the notice to the ISP. It doesn't seem like the ISP shared anything with NBC though.
  • JB · 1 year ago
    Jeremy: I had read that and on the Copyright 2.0 Show I talked about exactly that. My working theory is that the kid tried to access a false bittorrent tracker. that grabbed his information from there. I don't see any practical way that NBC could have gotten his "packet history" as even a modest one would have been over fifteen gigs in size for the month.

    The guy fell for a trap me thinks. It's that simple.