To Stop a Leak

You don't sound too surprised by all the bloggy furor that has erupted.
One of the things I mentioned in my blog is that at first blush I was outraged. My second response was "what a great story." It has all the elements of a big evil corporation versus a plucky upstart trying to do good.

Does a case like this have the makings of something that could end up before the Supreme Court?
There is another hearing on the 29th of February. My guess is that it will not get that far. I would hope that the folks at this bank have learned their lesson. They've blown it, and they may just want to back off. They can't do anything now. They can't remove the files. All they can do is hope people forget about them, and the best way for people to forget about them is to drop the case.

We've recently seen the Church of Scientology threaten Web sites for posting internal documents online. Is there a trend toward clamping down on content online? Or, as we're seeing with all these little sites hosting the Julius Baer documents, does the Web simply make it almost too easy to distribute content?
Both. With the Scientology thing, it was posted and pulled by major corporations. [The Web site] Gawker[.com] decided it was newsworthy and stuck with it. So the smaller guys are hoping to hide under the cover of "there's ten thousand of us; if they find me there's still 9,999 of us." There's two movements: defiant copyright holders attempting to assert more control—like when we saw Viacom sue YouTube for $1 billion—versus a million ants scurring around, each carrying a crumb. You can't step on all of them. If Pirate Bay is taken down, someone else will take their place.

Sounds like both a good thing and a bad thing.
It can be positive or negative. I'm happy to have government secrets posted on the Web. But I'm not so sure I am happy to have my own. There are some things that are for the public good. The question is: who decides?

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