p99/red99 slated to get shut down when SOPA passes

[Rogean]

I think I saw someone mention, maybe in this read or in somewhere else, that "Didn't SoE already agree to 'look the other way' on P99 as long as we don't charge money" and while that in some aspects may be true, let me put this out there.

I have had interactions with the President of SoE and that brief discussion I will not get into details on, what I will talk about is SoE's legal department, which operates on it's own free will on anything they deem necessary short of full law suites.

This means they will at their own discretion send out Cease and Decists and threatening letters/emails to persons, datacenters, upstream providers, and etc, for anything they stumble across that mentions the Everquest (or other SoE Trademark) name. The legal department does not need to coordinate with the senior management/executives of the company in order to do this. If there is a website legitimately using their Trademarks, it would be on file with SoE Legal Department.

However, in order to fully bring down a project such as ours, it would require a court order (so long as our datacenter has our back in not bowing down to corporate pressure, which it has already demonstrated this to us, as well as our legal protection of the DMCA). In order to proceed with that type of legal action, I'm sure it would need to be something carefully considered by SoE Legal AND the company executives/management, at which point, the questions come up, how does this course of action help/improve our company and protect our interests.

The truth is, it doesn't. There is no benefit for SoE spending legal time and money to come after us, especially considering they may end up losing in court anyways (We do operate on a grey line, but we are very arguably a legal project). At that point if Smed had a say in it I'm sure he would say don't bother, and I'm sure SoE Legal has never even brought it up to him to begin with, as they know themselves it isn't worth it.

Now to get to the point of all this, if this SOPA thing passes, you would have legal departments just like SoE's, operating of their own free will just like they are now when they fire off C&D's like candy, but instead they would be firing off SOPA Violation letters for any small thing they deem infringing, without due process, to shut down projects such as ours. Consider things like Lucy or Rasper's getting shut down because it has a walkthroughs for Everquest content. It would be done without the need for any sort of permission or involvement from the company's executives.

[Szeth]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I have had interactions with the President of SoE and that brief discussion I will not get into details on

It's Lumie isn't it? He told you about the lizard people didn't he?

[Humerox]

Hopefully Congress will come to its senses and take a good look at the OPEN Act.

SOPA and PIPA need to die...but restating what I said before in the thread, these bills are unconstitutional, and they would immediately be suspended by the court system until they were officially declared so.

I outlined the Stanford Law Review analysis a few posts back...and them boys don't play.