Vengeance Against Adobe

[Declan McCullagh]

Here's a prediction: This case will never come close to generating
the same amount of publicity, by at least two orders of magnitude.

Folks on the Net have a bad habit of overemphasizing how important 
these cases are. This is not important to the people in DC who count.

It has never been mentioned in the WSJ, the Washington Post, the
Washington Times. Even the SJMN -- the hometown paper! -- has been
running largely wire copy in its news coverage. I did a quick L/N
search and the only network/cable TV coverage seems to have been a 
brief mention on CNN.

Compare that to the kind of publicity the other two cases received,
and there's no contest.

Face it: The DMCA was designed to punish precisely what Elcomsoft
was doing. There's no comparison between that and WHL or RJ.

-Declan


On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 10:00:30PM -0700, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
> Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 
> > But the Feds won't back down as
> > readily as Adobe, I wager. They
> > don't have to worry about what
> > programmers think, they don't
> > have to worry about what Wall
> > Street thinks (at least DOJ
> > doesn't), they don't have to
> > worry about slipping revenue
> > in a soft economy and users
> > turning to non-Adobe tools.
> > In short, they have a different
> > incentive structure...
> 
> True, it may be different, but it is an incentive structure (or, more
> accurately, a disincentive structure).  For example, I don't thing the
> Federal Baby Incinerators really want to create another Wen Ho Lee or
> Richard Jewel fiasco.  They already have enough egg on their face.
> 
> 
>  S a n d y