FC: CyberPatrol brawl gets ugly and international, from CNN

[Declan McCullagh <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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