Random defendant outlawyers P2P attorney, gets lawsuit tossed | Hacker News Reader

Random defendant outlawyers P2P attorney, gets lawsuit tossed

arstechnica.com

42 pointslotusleaf19878 comments

Link in article didn't work for me, this one does:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/random-defen...

This isn't about a defendant that "outfought" a P2P attorney, this is about a company that tried to mass-sue on the cheap and got a judge that saw right through it. There was a number of problems with the plaintiffs case, the civilian defendant just reminded the judge of what he wanted to do in the first place.

That may be true, but there have been a number of these that went through unopposed and were therefore granted. I've heard lawyers say that you can get away with an awful lot of things if nobody objects.

Christ, will these websites please STOP doing this crazy hash bang shit? Its absolutely horrible from a user's perspective. You break the the URL. I don't care if Google said they can crawl it or not, they aren't your primary responsibility. Ever since the Gawker sites switched over to that awful new site design, it has not only been difficult to navigate (UI design problem, not hash bang), but simple things like the back button only work about 50% of the time.

I'll put an offer out to the community. If you guys can provide me with a list of urls for sites that use the hash-bang, and that have normal url equivalents, I'll write an extension, site, or javascript bookmarklet that auto-corrects these.

Where/why/when did this trend start? I saw it first on Twitter and Facebook, then the Gawker family of sites, and now it's spreading to other media outlets like Ars here.

First place I noticed it was "New" Twitter. This article was posted on HN a little while after Gawker changed their design which explains why it was implemented and why it shouldn't have to begin with:

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashB...

And it's discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196160

I removed /#!/ part in URL in OP. Went straight to article.

What's awesome here (aside from living in Arizona just like the plaintiff) is that one of the defendants asked the Internet if he should get a lawyer: http://answers.justia.com/question/2010/12/11/i-am-being-sue...

Looks like conventional wisdom gets bucked again?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com