Oh, the irony. In this lengthy, amply-footnoted post on Amish Tech Support blog, Laurence Simon does some HTML sleuthing to reveal that Sen. Orrin "Destroy Infringers' PCs" Hatch may be illicitly using copyrighted material from Milonic Software on his own website. If hatch.senate.gov were in fact in violation of Milonic Software's License agreement, and the senator's latest proposals became law, would Hatch's web server be eligible for destruction?
Senator Orrin Hatch's website uses a very impressive set of Javascript code for its menus, developed by Milonic Software. A professional developer's license is $34.99, and a corporate side-wide license goes for $899.00. However, non-profits seems to have access to the code for free as long as a license number is obtained. (…) So, does Orrin Hatch and his web support staff have a license number, or is he guilty of using unlicensed software himself? There's a "* i am the license for the menu (duh) *" comment in the View – Source, but no license ID number. Strange. Bigwig suggested to me that I compare his site's code to a licensed site's code. So I checked The Warren Human Society… no tag in the HTML mentioning licenses with a (duh)…
Not only does he not include a link to the software's home page, but his software's out of date. Close enough for government work, I guess, and he's too busy threatening to blow up copyright violators' computers to have his technicians maintain their systems (the software is actually up in the 3.4.x release level now, if I'm correct) Since I'd hate for one of the representatives of my country to be caught as a hypocrite on such an important issue (well, except for Robert Byrd, but after all these years he probably can't find his Klansman robe), I've sent a note to the author of the software…
