Groklaw's credit complaints

Message ID: 250133
Posted By: al_petrofsky
Posted On: 2005-03-26 16:26:00
Subject: Groklaw's credit complaints

PJ writes in groklaw story
20050325210414203:

> it appears the defenders of their most
> holy IP grabbed the PDFs from Groklaw
> and Frank's tuxrocks.com site without
> giving us credit for doing the work of
> obtaining the documents from the court
> and scanning them to create the
> PDFs. Oops. ... they have outdone
> themselves in smarmitude this time

I'm surprised PJ would make this
complaint, given groklaw's history of
doing the same thing. Furthermore,
whereas SCO simply says "Here are some
legal filings", without making any
representations about how the files were
obtained, PJ has presented files copied
from scofacts.org and spun yarns about
her wonderful volunteer community
picking them up from the court. She's
also presented, without any attribution,
a transcript from a courtroom audio
recording, which of course involves a
lot more work than a simple scan.

See SCOX messages 183319 and 201346, and
CKX 884:

http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&sid=1607394124&tid=ckx&mid=884
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&sid=1600684464&tid=cald&mid=201346
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&sid=1600684464&tid=cald&mid=183319

I also wonder whether groklaw has any
evidence that SCO actually retrieved
anything from groklaw. I would guess
SCO downloaded all the files in question
from the sco.tuxrocks.com site, which
says right at the top of the page that
"this site has no official affiliation
with Groklaw".

Message ID: 250134
Posted By: diogenese19348
Posted On: 2005-03-26 16:31:00
Subject: Re: Groklaw's credit complaints
<<
I'm surprised PJ would make this
complaint, given groklaw's history of
doing the same thing.
>>

Frankly myself also. Sometimes it is hard to see the nose on the end of our own face. It is a court document, it is public data, and it got pulled to a website. Yes, it is nice to document who took the time to do that. No, it is not a violation of anything to copy it elsewhere.

In this case PJ clearly got it wrong. And I do not take sides in the Grokwars.

Message ID: 250818
Posted By: al_petrofsky
Posted On: 2005-03-29 07:57:00
Subject: Re: Groklaw's complaint / Al's spin
Recs: 23
Rating: 0
Raters: 0

(Message 250461 by trade_for_play
responded, in a different thread, to the
parent and grandparent of this post. To
make it easier to find the context of
everything, I'm following up in this
thread, with a link to his post:
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&sid=1600684464&tid=cald&mid=250461
)

The IBM document was added to Tuxrocks
in June, and the Daimler document was
added to Groklaw in November. In both
instances, no source was identified, and
in both instances, I made no complaint.

What I spoke up about were the false and
hypocritical statements about the
documents that were later made on
groklaw:

1. In October, groklaw said the IBM doc
was picked up by a groklaw volunteer.

2. This weekend, groklaw said that all
the documents on groklaw were obtained
by groklaw directly from the courts.

The October groklaw story says:

groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041031164745937&mode=print

> ... A volunteer picked it up.
...
> Groklaw has almost 8,000 members
> currently. Some live in Utah, some in
> Nevada, some in Delaware, and some in
> Michigan. So there's always been
> someone willing to get the documents
> in person. ...
> It pays to be part of a large
> community, you know.

I think a reader could be expected to
understand this to mean that the
document had been picked up by one of
those 8,000 current members, rather than
obtained through someone whose
membership PJ had terminated.

In the comment two days ago, PJ says:

> we only use documents we personally
> pick up from the court or get from
> Pacer, and there is not a single
> document here on Groklaw that I didn't
> personally get from the courts in one
> of those two ways.

This sentence changes gears a bit midway
through, from "we" to "I ... personally".
Either way, I think it's clear -- and
has been since long before the November
Daimler document -- that scofacts is not
part of the Groklaw "we" nor the PJ "I",
yet it was the source of at least two
documents on Groklaw.

--------------------

On verifying file origins:

For both the IBM and the Daimler doc, if
you compare every byte of the version at
scofacts with the one at groklaw, you'll
find they're all the same. This would
not happen with two independent scans.

Tuxrocks also has a copy of the IBM doc,
which is also identical, and which
tuxrocks now identifies as originating
from me. Obviously, this would imply
that any file at groklaw comprising that
same byte sequence also has the same
origin.

For both the IBM and Daimler docs, you
can also observe that the pdf "Producer"
and "Creator"/"Application" header
fields of the files are consistent with
all the other scofacts scans and
inconsistent with groklaw scans.

The texts of these Yahoo Message Board posts have been licensed for copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board users "al_petrofsky", "diogenese19348" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.