Fantastic TidBITS article about Rolex's moron lawyers sending a cease-and-desist letter to John Gimore for hosting the archive of a mailing list that includes a spam for fake Rolexes.
Since the FreeS/WAN list is archived on the Web, Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc. (remember Rolex? It's an article about Rolex) found the post in searches for the counterfeiters of Rolex watches. It's obvious to anyone over the age of 13 (and probably lots of people under that age) that the spam appearing in the FreeS/WAN archive is something that happened to the FreeS/WAN list, not something that the FreeS/WAN list intentionally propagated. It was an accident, and an unfortunate one at that. But obvious though this is, a group of highly paid attorneys hired by Rolex couldn't figure this out and sent a cease-and-desist letter (undoubtedly accompanied by twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one) to John Gilmore telling him that, as the person who registered the freeswan.org domain, he could be liable for damages up to $1,000,000 for posting content that violated the Rolex trademark, promoted counterfeiting, and diluted Rolex's intellectual property rights. Now that's adding injury to insult! First spam makes it through to a list you run, and then you're threatened by lawyers because of it.
(Thanks, Henry!)
