First of all, sorry to all my non-German speaking audience. Things have been developing rather quickly last week so I just took the sample page of the organization managing this Internet protest and it was German only. I had to go to work before I could manage to translate the message so that's how it was.

Now what was all this fuzz about ? Once upon a time, there was an evil German lawyer (and it's been very long indeed), appearing at demo parties (you know, those where all the geeks meet and exchange their gfx demos and, quite naturally, one or the other pirated copy of a program). Back then, Mr. German Lawyer made his money by uninvitedly appearing at those parties and trying to get people to make pirated copies. If they did, it definitely wasn't their day. He even placed ads in computer magazines reading something like "15 year old geek girl wants to swap software "(and maybe more ?!?). Ok, this was the story of the lawyer involved in this case, not exactly a blank sheet of paper if you see it this way.

Now there's Symicron, a company which somehow managed to get a trademark on the word explorer. Guess who their lawyer is ? Right. Of course this company went straight for the worst thing they could possibly do in their case: They sent cease and desist orders to holders of private homepages linking to software like FTP-Explorer because using their trademark in a link would allegedly violate trademark law in Germany (you're allowed to use the word but not in advertising of marketing. Certain lawyers, see above, are obviously seeing links as a sole marketing thing).

The case gained some publicity when Symicron sued the maintainer of http://www.netzwelt.com/selfhtml/, probably the most complete free guide on html programming on the web. Soon an organization called Freedom for links popped up, promising to provide funding if the author of selfHtml wouldn't just go the easy way and pay the cease and desist order but fight this thing all the way through court. To draw some public attention to the case, they decided to run some sort of internet protest in which more than a thousand websites have been participating.

A glance at the forseeable future: although there's no final ruling in this case yet, everything looks like the judge would rather sue the pope over mass murder than to confirm Mr. German Lawyer's views of using the word explorer in a link being a trademark violation. Anyway, there's no final ruling yet (which will be announced Oct. 25th) and Symicron has already said that they'll appeal.

As a parallel development, German computer magazine Ct, having received one of those cease and desist orders themselves, are now suing Symicron for abusing it's trademark. If they win, Symicron will lose any rights on the name explorer which would definitely be a good thing and something I'd love to see happening to Mr. German Lawyer.

Please note that I didn't set any links to either the lawyer nor the company doing those ridiculous thing. I don't think they deserve the extra hits on their homepage. This kind of people should better be let alone.