Samizdata - 1:31 am on Dec 31, 2008 (gmt 0)

GateHouse Media has done nothing to protect their copyrighted material

From the legal complaint filed by Gatehouse:

Gatehouse implemented certain electronic security measures on Wicked Local, to prevent users with a certain Boston.com Internet Protocol ("IP") address from scraping content from Gatehouse's website. Plaintiff's security measures did not deter defendant in the least - defendant posted original content to the Infringing Website the very next day after they were installed.

This suggests that they did not do nothing, rather that they did something useless.

And as incrediBILL points out, search engine caches remained available.

And, of course, no security measure can stop manual copying.

There are other aspects to the case that may or may not be worthy of debate, but I will be pleasantly surprised if jury members have the mechanics of website "security measures" adequately explained to them.

My prediction: no lawyer will lose.

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