Article from CNN (English)

Following what seems to be latest fad in the US system of laws and jurisprudence, the DMCA has been carefully designed to enable people like Alex Haldermann to be put in jail for no good reason. Haldermann had the nerve to inform people about how pressing the shift key while loading the CD into the drive would defeat the copy protection scheme. This Action of Evil could land Alex in jail for a long time, especialy if a link can be possibly be made to Al Quaida or recreational drug use by any of his friends and relatives.

Remember, some including Bill Gates would have us believe "The whole IP thing...is not a thing that existed in the past". Gee, is history no longer taught or known in the US? There is a perfectly good book which tells strikingly similar stories: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay, published in 1841. For those who are unfamiliar with the book and its stories, here is a link in Pittsburgh City Paper to the particular anecdote I'm thinking of:

'In recounting Holland's "Tulipomania," Mackay rather amusingly relates the story of a hungry sailor in Holland on shore leave. Unaware of the tulip craze, he mistakes a merchant's tulip bulb - which cost as much as a herd of sheep -- for an onion. The merchant notices the "onion" is missing, and hunts down the sailor, who is found on a dock devouring the last of his breakfast. "Little did he dream that he had been eating a breakfast whose cost might have regaled a whole ship's crew for a twelvemonth," Mackay observes. The sailor is thrown in jail for several months...'

USD 10 million loss because of a shift-key press lesson, jail time... Alex says in the article that he's unconcerned, so he probably has good lawyers. He'll probably need them, he is definitely scape-goat material in the US.

Here's the link to the original article, and here's a backup in case the thought police make the original go away.

Willy Smith reporting from Costa Rica

Update - Suit Cancelled! (English)