Time: Mon Oct 27 03:35:19 1997 Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 16:41:04 -0700 To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in toolbar] Subject: SLL: copyright violations and file development Cc: supremelaw@ibm.net, pmitch@primenet.com [This text is formatted in Courier 11, non-proportional spacing.] MEMO TO: Team SL FROM: Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S. Counselor at Law DATE: October 26, 1997 SUBJECT: SLL and Copyright Developments I'll try to summarize briefly the progress I have made with copyright enforcement, and SLL file development. The Alta Vista results were edited into HTML, and then posted to a private file on the website. Alta Vista is only one among numerous search engines which we can exploit for this project, but it is still by far the best, so people do tend to feed all their URL's to it, en masse. Some SLL URL's have not been fed to Alta Vista yet, because I have just not had the time. Alta Vista reported 136 separate files with "The Federal Zone", in one or more places within each file. Thus, this report is now a very good administrative control for further research, documentation, and evidence gathering. The results of requesting other search engines -- to find the exact same key word -- can be appended, in continuous numerical order, to the Alta Vista report. The results of these subsequent queries will need to be integrated, one at a time, with the first 136, to avoid unnecessary duplication. Several more large universities have surfaced as violators. We are generating two paper folders for each major violation: one for the user who authored the violation, and one for the ISP which hosts this user and his violation. Some of the universities have even slandered us, directly or indirectly, by grouping "The Federal Zone" with "hate groups" and/or "extremists." All we need to do there is cite Kennedy's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Lopez, and I expect that such innuendo will be retracted. The rate of visits to Gilbertson's OPENING BRIEF continues to be very high, and this is a very good sign. The email traffic, in general, is beginning to exhibit a lot of obvious silence on the merits as discussed in that brief. Gilbertson evidently will never know what he has done by abandoning that defense. Our policy is that all violators will be treated equally, and an ISP cannot claim ignorance, when their behavior is closer to negligence, if not outright aiding and abetting. If you think about it, a valid "link," whether active now or not, means that the person who activated the link must have tested it. For our purposes, this means that one or more chapters of the book were downloaded onto that user's computer -- passing through his modem, into his RAM, and then into a disk cache directory, if not also saved to a user directory. This conduct violates the copyright, in all cases. It is critical to understand that absolutely no one, whatsoever, ever requested, much less obtained, permission to host the electronic fourth edition on the Internet in this fashion. That is why we will treat "linkers" and "hosts" identically. In this context, a "host" is an ISP which has all or part of the book on a computer which they own or control. A "linker" is someone who modified an HTML file in order to "point to," or "link to," a host copy. Our legal position here is that the "linkers" are literally pointing to stolen property, and that means they are accessories who have aided and abetted the same violation as a "host." Under 18 U.S.C. 2, accessories and principals are treated one and the same, for purposes of criminal liability. I am confident I can prevail with this argument before a jury. We need to beef up our negotiating stance, because it could happen that we fall into a stalemate with some organizations which may counter offer, and then use that position to stall any further good faith negotiations. I could see a scenario which embraces a "last and best" offer, beyond which criminal complaints are filed, and civil actions are commenced. I would prefer to organize all the evidence to support a charge of conspiracy, under 18 U.S.C. 242. When the jury gets to hear a long train of defendants, numbering in the 100's, all of whom are trying to worm out of the exact same violation, using a variety of stupid and indefensible arguments, it is going to get rather repetitively obvious what has really been going on. The bigger question is the court in which to sue. I know from brutal experience that the federal courts will be entirely unsympathetic to my authorship rights. I know enough now to disqualify all federal judges, without exception, on numerous counts; however, convincing a state superior court that it has jurisdiction over out-of-state violators will be no picnic either. The standing reservation appended by Congress to the International Covenant, is the only way to go, as far as subject matter jurisdiction is concerned. On the practical side, preparing for these earnest negotiations, and generating all the paperwork they will require, will be no picnic either. It would help me enormously if all of you could install an Iomega ZIP drive, so that I can feed you huge chunks, if the latest file set does not fit onto one cartridge. The website files alone just doubled in size, because we have outputted HTML files for each ASCII file, then written a backup (.BAM = BAckup of the Markup language, because .BAH looks too much like .BAK). Each .BAK file is a backup of the corresponding ASCII ("K" for ASCII). So, I see two ZIP cartridges evolving: copyright enforcement, and website development. I would like to nail down every known violator, with some assurance that the files and links in question have been removed completely from the Internet, before we host the electronic seventh edition in SLL. This development needs to wait anyway, until we get our PREEDIT batch program tested and installed in production mode. Then, we can literally haul -- on entire sets of ASCII files, and have them all pre- edited in a matter of seconds. I will ask Corbin tomorrow if he has any good systems programmers on his staff. This particular function is one which we can afford to donate to the Internet, once it is up and running. The Tables of Contents are a trickier problem, but Toney Anderson has generously donated a new copy of Page Mill 2.0. This program can be exploited to update TOC's quickly, without the need for laborious manual edits. The key here is to have a template, like PROLOG.HTM and EPILOG.HTM, which will allow us literally to "drop" string constants into pre-assigned spaces in the template file. This is something I have done a lot, because we did so much work with language compilers and operating systems, during my minicomputer heyday. The template can be either blocked and copied, or blocked and deleted, in order to accommodate a larger or smaller number of actual filenames, respectively. Have you noticed how very "tight" that batch FOR-DO loop is, for our needs? It works the same from 1 to N input filenames, where N is any large integer (e.g. >100). Tables of Contents should be limited, for practical purposes, however, by grouping files into a larger number of "folders," or categories. So, the value of N will best never reach 100. To this end, we will begin "pushing down" the list of court cases, into a separate Table of Contents just for cases; likewise, there will also be another separate category for "Resources," and any other aggregates which make sense. In this fashion, the website tree structure will grow in both dimensions -- horizontally AND vertically. Hopefully, Page Mill will help facilitate this maintenance task. That's about it for now. This is enough of a brain dump for today. The Most High woke me up at midnight last night, I know now because that window of time is THE most quiet one on the Internet. Plus, we rolled back the clocks, so I gained an hour relative to everyone else (except Arizona). I have really been pounding on the net, with both fists, because the HTML evidence had to be gathered for each URL. I also stored each file at each node higher up in these URL's, as a way of "walking up" the pathname to its logical "root." This helped me to isolate the ISP's and their administrative offices (telephones, mailing addresses, titles, etc.); that information is not usually mentioned at the tail end of these URL's. You may need to re-read this entire memo, and get in sync with my thinking about these two projects; but, if you do, I believe you will see what a good strategy is now evolving. One of the peripheral ("side") benefits, of course, is that all this Internet research will overlap a lot with leverage for future marketing efforts. The eventual publicity concerning stubborn violators will do wonders for SLL visibility. Bye for now. Sincerely yours, /s/ Paul Mitchell Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S. Counselor at Law and federal witness c/o 2509 N. Campbell Avenue, #1776 Tucson 85719/tdc ARIZONA STATE (See USPS Publication #221.) email: supremelaw@ibm.net (586/Eudora Pro 3.0.3(32): preferred, to conserve all resources) phone: (520) 320-1514 (private line: please get permission to disclose) fax machine: (520) 320-1256 (dedicated hard copy: available 24-hours per day or night) website: http://www.supremelaw.com # # # =========================================================================== Paul Andrew Mitchell, Sui Juris : Counselor at Law, federal witness 01 B.A.: Political Science, UCLA; M.S.: Public Administration, U.C.Irvine 02 tel: (520) 320-1514: machine; fax: (520) 320-1256: 24-hour/day-night 03 email: [address in toolbar] : using Eudora Pro 3.0.3 on 586 CPU 04 website: http://supremelaw.com : visit the Supreme Law Library now 05 ship to: c/o 2509 N. Campbell, #1776 : this is free speech, at its best 06 Tucson, Arizona state : state zone, not the federal zone 07 Postal Zone 85719/tdc : USPS delays first class w/o this 08 _____________________________________: Law is authority in written words 09 As agents of the Most High, we came here to establish justice. We shall 10 not leave, until our mission is accomplished and justice reigns eternal. 11 ======================================================================== 12 [This text formatted on-screen in Courier 10, non-proportional spacing.] 13
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