TWO brushes with the DMCA in one week!

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Over the weekend, I got a Valentines love note from Microsoft, putting me on the receiving end of a DMCA smackdown. Today, I'm on a conference call, and it looks like I am part of the dispatching end of a DMCA smackdown. Not to get into the messy legal details and actions of the four involved parties (when ends up being like a complex drama), basically we have been doing work for someone writing software. Over the past two years, we have spent about $2M in development resources (not to mention costs of management, marketing, contracts, etc) to write software for a company (they have an exclusive contract with us). They merge with another company with a separate exclusive contract with another development house and share our source code with the other developers. They are competitors, offering the same services as us, and would stand to gain a lot from our code. It seems they reverse engineered most of it, but emailed someone asking about a missing module.

That email got forwarded a few times and ended up in our laps, and we were like, “Huh? WHO has access to our software? WHO is reverse engineering it and wants more code and documentation? Our natural sworn enemy who just recently started to cobble together software like the stuff we offer has our source code???”

So now we have some high-power San Francisco lawyers with experience taking on people like Microsoft and Exxon. We are serving up law suits and cease and desist orders left and right citing all sorts of stuff like breach of confidentiality, breach of contract, DMCA infractions, and a bunch of other stuff.

MMMmmm…litigation. Can't live with it; can't live without it.

In unrelated news, I do not think I have had a full night's sleep since getting Ebenezer. While he has gotten really good about not attempting to sleep on my face or windpipe AS OFTEN, he still does a pretty good job of waking me up. He has also learned an inventive way of waking in the night, moving next to me while I am on my side, and resting his chin on the side of my head, such that I get to wake up in the middle of the night to heavy breathing in my ear.

In other cat news, Ebenezer had his physical today. The vet said that next time he gets an animal, I may have to name it based on the history of unusual pet names. Everything checked out, but there was a little bit of a heart murmur. It could be something he will grow out of, it could be a permanent minor genetic thing, it could get worse. There's no way to tell. As a kid, one of my family's cats was a siamese with a heart murmor (it's a common known ailment in siamese) that lived to be between 21 and 23 (my parents did not know his exact age when they got him). Since sphynx are not too distant from siamese, we are guessing that's it. Although, how much would it suck if this were like a Pants situation, which went from “I think Pants is feeling a little sick, but I can't quite put my finger on any particular symptom” to 24-48 hours later “Pants is going to die in a week or two.” Best not to think about it. It's probably just a benign and minor genetic characteristic.

Posted in: Dear Diary Work

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