You may, for example, violate food disparagement laws here, because I am willing to join you in that particular act. McDonalds burgers are unhealthy! Sue me, McDonalds. But if you conspire to burn down the local McDonalds, I will kill your account. If you can't tell the difference between common vandalism and the principled civil disobedience of Gandhi, King, and Brian Wilson, then get some good nonviolence training, because you're dangerous to the Green movement.
The RSA Patent civil disobedience

I would prefer that you use Secure Shell and the Secure Copy that comes with it instead of Telnet and FTP. It was civil disobedience to use the Secure Shell for MacOS in the US, but the patent has expired.

You were infringing that patent, which was not recognized by any nation except the US, if you ran NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH r3 on a Mac in the US. It was an act of civil disobedience to do that, but it wasn't software piracy, it was patent infringement. I'm not a lawyer and you should get legal advice before committing any civil disobedience.

The Unisys patent on Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format

This is another stupid software patent. The "GIF" format that most people use for inline images uses a patented compression algorithm. It is illegal to write software that creates GIF files, and give that software away, unless you pay a royalty to Unisys Corporation. Unisys has announced they will no longer enforce their rights to this patent. Which only shows they still don't get it. The right way to handle it would be to grant licenses to it for free to anyone who asks.

I won't be held liable for any fines or damages for your civil disobedience. But you are free to create all the GIF-drawing software you want and give it away on my equipment. I'll applaud your infringing this particular patent as a protest against the absurd state of software patent law in the US.

(You might consider writing for the Portable Network Graphics format instead. IE and Netscape have supported it for years. See? --> )

You may access rachel, chico, and gandhi from a Time Warner Roadrunner Cable Modem account, and you may run any operating system on your computer to do it. It's a violation of Roadrunner's terms to connect using any OS they don't "support," and that includes MacOS 8.5, Linux, FreeBSD, Atari TOS, FreeDOS, BeOS, Inferno, and Microsoft Windows 3.1.


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