Comment Re:A side benefit of DMCA, perhaps ? (Score 2) 273
That exists for indie sites, HAD was one of those once. It now has corporate backers, who did not mind the original Tektronic article but who seem wary to expend that much defending a suit.
Were they still a small indie LLC, with little to no resources, they could probably get a Pro Bono lawyer and have fun with it. What would be the worst Tektronics could win? The domain, if things were structured well; but not even the content (posts owned by poster, sub-license to a new LLC to set up a clone site, blah blah blah). But that isn't the case anymore. With a real bank roll behind them, and big advertisers, a lawyer is more likely to ask for money and a suit could be pretty damaging. If their advertisers pull out, the site goes away.
What confounds me is that Tek went after HAD in the first place. HAD didn't discover the hack, they just posted a link to someone who had a demo key that they had to return, an EEPROM reader that they hooked up, and the brains to spot a publicly available string and wire up another EEPROM to do the same thing. How did HAD suddenly become the party that needs a suit? Other than them just having deeper pockets that Joe Random Hacker.
And maybe Tektronics is busy with a breach of NDA or some other suit against the guy who tinkered with the EEPROM key that he was being loaned.
Disclaimer: I read HAD daily. I hope to get some hacks up there eventually, so maybe I have a vested interest in defending them.