Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Mycroft And The First Amendment

28 Jul 2020

I’ve posted about this before, but for those of you who aren’t aware #Mycroft is currently being sued by a patent troll called Voice Tech. The courts in this case have made a highly questionable decision, so I am going to use day 73 of my #100DaysToOffload series to respond.

I hate patent trolls. With a passion. They use and abuse the legal system, preying on companies often too small to defend themselves. It’s my opinion that’s what is currently happening with Mycroft, and I don’t like it.

A recent TECHDIRT article brought something to my attention I hadn’t seen before. The courts in this case have made the highly questionable decision to tell Mycroft they need to edit the posts they’ve made around the proceedings. It’s my opinion (and obviously the opinion of the author over at TECHDIRT) that this “decision” is the wrong one. So, before Mycroft has the opportunity to comply with this frankly stupid decision, I’m capturing the original text here. I doubt it will come to the attention of Voice Tech, but if it does, this text will not be modified.

Further, the courts have asked for the removal of the emails linked to a the the bottom of this post, so I’m including those as well. Here are emails one, two, three, and four.

And this is the “Final Notice” letter linked to in the original blog post.

The original links to these are as follows:

Blog post

Email 1,2,3

Email 4

Final Notice Email

And this part is just for fun. The courts have said that there is no need for the image attribution at the bottom of the blog post. So here are the image attributions:

  1. Jesuskirken Trold (CC BY-SA 2.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesuskirken_-_trold.jpg
  2. Fremontsky Troll (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fremontsk%C3%BD_troll.jpg

It’s moderately self serving, but I would love it if either this post was shared around, or the TECHDIRT article detailing this debacle.



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