Comment by smnrchrds
5 years ago
It's not the visitors they are going to bring up in the court. The angle they push will probably be something along the lines of: the intern stole our intellectual property and put them out there on GitHub. There is no way we can put the cat back in the bag. As a result of this disclosure, we are suffering a financial loss of 100s of millions of dollars. Even if his website has 0 visitors, now thousands of people have access to our intellectual property and they collectively have a lot of visitors.
I mean, it's not like Anthony Levandowski put millions of self-driving cars in the streets and took business away from Waymo's self-driving cars. Just by copying Google's intellectual property, not even publishing it for the whole world to see, he committed an offence that cost 18 months in prison and more than 100 million dollars in fines.
Of course, this lawsuit may not have gotten that far, as it seems quite baseless. But it would have taken years of mental turmoil and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for that to be established. And that is if the threat of the unfavourable outcome did not cause another tragedy like Aaron Swartz's.
In a working justice system the judge takes one look at all that and dismisses the case, then fines them for a frivolous waste of the court’s time.
Well, then I guess US and Canada's justice systems are non-working. Because that's not what will happen in practice. Also, there is a lot of legal work that needs to get done even before getting in front of a judge, and those can cost 100 ks on their own.
As far as I read the news and if it is true, then indeed I believe the US system is quite broken. Seems geared towards screwing over and bullying the poor.
Right, the “cat our of the bag” argument. Also similar to the ones used in the Napster, Torrent, eMule file-sharing persecutions whereby any forgettable film shared would instantly tally as a lost sale for each-and-every participant to the platform. :/