Comment Re:Whose rights were violated again? Hmm? (Score 2, Informative) 423
Last time I looked, there is no such thing as "intellectual property rights". There is copyright law, patent law, and trademark law. These three are commonly grouped as "intellectual property" in the media, but that phrase has no legal standing.
As far as I can tell, no Cisco copyright was violated; no patents were infringed; and no trademarks were fraudulently used. Thus nothing illegal has occurred.
The only remaining possibility in the U.S. is a violation of the DMCA, which Cisco hasn't mentioned. The DMCA is pretty complex, but as far as I can see, the only way it would apply here is if Cisco had encrypted their information and Lynn had decrypted it for commercial purposes. I don't know if compiling source code to object code counts as encryption for the DMCA, and the purposes of the "decryption" are a fair stretch in that context anyway. So I don't see that as being a legal problem here either.
