His­tory of Copy­right [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

Given the recent fuss raised by cor­rupt politi­cians (SOPA and ACTA) and thugs enforc­ing the “laws” of the Evil Empire on its pup­pet states, its inter­est­ing to look at this seven part series on the his­tory of copyright.

Fea­ture: A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmit­i­gated gall” derailed one man’s life.

High-tech entre­pre­neur Peter Adekeye’s year­long night­mare began after he dropped his wife off at the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional air­port and headed down­town to The Wedge­wood, a posh bou­tique hotel. Inside a taste­ful board­room adorned with gilt-framed mir­rors, the US Dis­trict Court for North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, San Jose divi­sion, had con­vened a spe­cial sit­ting to hear Adekeye’s depo­si­tion as part of a mas­sive antitrust action he had launched against his for­mer employer, the com­puter giant Cisco Sys­tems. An offi­cial court video cam­era recorded the pro­ceed­ings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affa­bly answer­ing ques­tions in an ele­gant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, how­ever, two plain­clothes women—the shorter one bran­dish­ing a badge—and two uni­formed police offi­cers entered the room. Adek­eye was con­fused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the spe­cial judi­cial mas­ter con­duct­ing the hear­ing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

“I’m from the RCMP,” the taller woman said, “I’m sorry I have to inter­rupt your meet­ing here.”

[Ars Tech­nica]

From this arti­cle we learn that if you annoy Cisco, by bring­ing a law­suit against them for exam­ple, they can get the KGB’s immi­gra­tion peo­ple to keep you out of the coun­try (and away from the court­room), and if you find a workaround for that they can get a pros­e­cu­tor to charge you with a phony “crime” and arrest you in the mid­dle of tes­ti­fy­ing for the law­suit (thus keep­ing you from being heard). Clearly Cisco is get­ting their money’s worth from their bribes “cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions” to elected officials.

In the end their use of bla­tant cor­rup­tion didn’t help Cisco, as they still lost the law­suit, so appar­ently their bribes where misplaced–it seems like it would have been more effec­tive for them to bribe the judge in the law­suit. Still, this case pro­vides an exam­ple of how cor­rupt the US legal sys­tem is, and how it can be sub­verted by an orga­ni­za­tion with a lot of money.

From the August 2010 issue of Rea­son Mag­a­zine:

“It’s a dou­ble stan­dard,” Akram Allos, owner of Sin­bad Café in Dear­born, com­plained to the Detroit Free Press. “Just because we didn’t have a lob­by­ist, why should we have to suffer?”

That is why you have to suf­fer, Mr. Allos. Wel­come to the land of the fee and the home of the slave.

These peo­ple are so crooked they screw their socks on in the morning…

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