Court victory for MUTE author
p2p news / p2pnet: Jason Rohrer, the author of the indie MUTE p2p application, is feeling well pleased with himself following the results of a lawsuit.
He was being sued not for copyright violation, but for letting the grass grow.
Single mother of five Patti Santangelo is defending herself against a brutal attack launched against her and her children by the Big Four Organized Music cartel’s RIAA, and Rohrer wrote the script for her Fight Goliath campaign.
p2pnet editor / founder Jon Newton is also being sued in a bizarre lawsuit from the other side of the same fence. Rather than being victimized by the corporate music industry, instead he’s being sued by Kazaa p2p application owner Sharman Networks and Kazaa ceo Nikki Hemming, both of whom purport to be supporters of the p2p community. They say they were defamed in a p2pnet story which outlined Australian court proceedings into Hemming’s assets. They’re also demanding that Newton hand over details of a p2pnet reader who posted an anonymous comment which was included in the same story.
Newton, too, is defending himself and Rohrer wrote the script for the p2pnet Stop-the-Blogsuit fund-raising campaign.
“As far as I’m concerned, an anonymous post is the same as a confidential source,” states Newton. “I don’t have to like a post, or even agree with it. But I believe that as an honest and responsible human being, I do have to safeguard the poster, if indeed I know who he or she is which in this case, I don’t. If Sharman wins it’ll make life a potential hell for bloggers in Canada, at the least. And you can bet the case will be used as a reference for similar actions around the world.”
Back to Rohrer’s case, he and his wife, Lauren, don’t have a carefully manicured lawn surrounding their house in New York : they have natural meadow certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a wildlife habitat.
“Of course, a meadow includes some tall grasses (in some places, our grasses are waist-high),” Rohrer told p2pnet a while back.
“Our village has a ‘mowing ordinance’ that forbids grass from exceeding 10 inches in height. The ordinance was enforced against 34 traditionally mowed lawns in 2005 and one natural meadow landscape (ours).
“I was brought to trial for violation of the ordinance. I represented myself and presented a constitutional law argument. I filed a 16-page memorandum of law with the court as part of my defense. I called an expert witness (a landscape architect and former government official in our county) to testify. The trial lasted over three hours.”
Now, “We won,” he said. “It feels really good. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
“It’s been a wild ride.”
On his blog, ” My wife was convinced that the verdict would be ‘guilty’,” he says.
Good on you, Jason. This couldn’t have happened to nicer people.
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