I have just replied a rather amusing email from Tim Bingham of Secure System Technologies. I guess he's ready to start selling "his" VB Semi Decompiler because he seems to have taken rather delayed exception to my comments in this blog entry from January.
The content of his email is as follows:
Mail from The Insane Ramblings of Wonko The Sane:
Sender: Tim Bingham
Email: secure1@securesystemtech.com
IP Address: xx.xx.xx.xxx
=====================================
There is a post posted on Posted on Monday, January 17, 2005 10:01 PM labeled Warning to customers of Secure System Technologies, this post is considered slander and I do NOT grant vbcity the right to use the copyrighted name Secure System Technologies on its sites, therefore this post and any post pretaining to secure system technologies and or containing the name secure system technologies shall be removed asap or legal action will be taken for slander, federal and international copyright violations, along with sueing for possible lost profits due to such posts.
An excellent email Tim, well done. It's nice to see that a dangerously amateur knowledge of US domestic and international law doesn't stop you from trying to throw your weight around. Also good to see that missing your English lessons on punctuation and grammer haven't harmed your ability to send such convincing official emails.
Anyway, I digress. My swift reply tearing his email apart is as follows:
The contents of the blog belong to me and not vbCity. You will note the copyright statement at the bottom of every page clearly states that the material is copyright by me and not vbCity. What I said I believe to be true in the light of evidence that was presented to me and I presume that you have proof it is not? You clearly haven't spoken to a lawyer because if you did you wouldn't be threatening me with slander as slander is a spoken mis-truth. Libel is when it's written down. To successfully sue somebody for libel - even in the US - you have to prove that I deliberately wrotee down a false statement about you. Also, you cannot copyright a company name, you trademark it. Federal copyright laws only apply to US citizens and as I am not one they are irrelevant. International copyright laws are equally irrelevant as nothing I said is subject to copyright laws because you cannot trademark a company name. You can feel free to sue me for loss of profits - I will submit as defence evidence from the original author of the software in question to prove that you are not the author of the software who may actually choose to sue you. I take it this email is a pre-cursor to you wanting to sell the software again? From my research at the time I noticed that you threatened similar things to the owner of a website that had used images you had on your website that were themselves copyrighted material from film companies.
My advice to you my friend is to speak to a lawyer before you start trying to threaten people. If you continue to send communications to me in this tone it is you who will find yourself on the receiving end of a letter from a lawyer for defamation and harassment.
You are perfectly entitled to reply to the post on my blog and defend yourself.
To put this all into context, the logo of Secure System Technologies features 3 characters from the Matrix as well as the tumbling numbers from the same film. These are, of course, copyright of Warner Bros. The top downloads on the site are Server Fuck (hacking), Autohack (hacking), Firewall Killer (hacking), Packet Inspector (hacking), IGMP Nuke (hacking) ... the list goes one and all basically the same type of stuff.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.