Nathan Wallwork's legal status

2003-08-15 -- I recently received my first cease and desist letter, and I wrote one in reponse, so I guess that makes things even.

I'm hoping I don't have any legal battles worth documenting, but I'm preparing for it just in case, as our court systems have been making many mistakes recently, and the country seems to be becoming more and more litigious.

In light of cases like United States vs. ApolloMedia and librarians under gag order, I'm including statements on this page, which I hope to be able to remove (or fail to update) if they ever stop being true. If you are not familiar with these cases, you should read them now!

As of 2007-10-01, I am not subject to any gag orders.
As of 2007-10-01, I retain all rights to discuss my legal status and all litigation in which I may be involved.
As of 2007-10-01, I have not been compelled to make or publish any false statements.

Anyone may request that I update this page if it is more than a week out of date. I promise to update this page quickly every time anyone asks me to do so. If such a request is ignored, it means that I am unable to comply with the request.

The logic here is that I'd like to be able to signal in some way if I am under a gag order, if only by no longer declaring that I am not under a gag order, and I hope that I cannot be compelled to make or publish false statements, or compelled to leave false statements in place. If this page, or the declarations above are removed, the declarations above are perhaps no longer true.

This page has been indexed by search engines. It can be compared with a cached page from a Google search. The cached page can be found directly here

I'd like to encourage everyone to have a page like this one, in order to make the use of gag orders less appealing and to insure that everyone has a way to let others know they are under a gag order without violating the gag order.

To the best of my knowledge:
As of 2007-10-01, I am not currently involved in any litigation.
As of 2007-10-01, I am not currently under investigation.
As of 2007-10-01, I have no plans to initiate any litigation.
As of 2007-10-01, I am not aware of any planned litigation directed at myself.

I have some questions about DeCSS that I'd like answered. In case you care, my intent here isn't to distrbitue these files in order to help others break the law, but to help insure that these files are readily accessable to anyone who wants to understand what this whole DeCSS thing is about, and so that anyone who wants these files in order to pursue their rights to 'fair use' has one more place to find them. Yes, I am aware that I am distributing these files, that is my intent. I have not been ask to stop distributing these files and I am aware of no legal requirement that I not distribute these files. To the best of my understanding, code has been found to be legally equivalent to speech. If you have a problem with any of this or wish to provide my with some legal text you feel I should be aware of, please let me know. I'll be happy to provide you with a postal address if you need to send me any legal papers or court orders.

webmast3r@pungent.org.     owen@pungent.org.     Last modified: 2007-10-09