For the newbies, this post is a follow up on my situation regarding the Watch Tower's law suit against my due to my Watch Tower Quotes web site. For the background on the story so far, see these threads:
- Quotes website receives "Cease & Desist"
- Quotes website: Defending and Legally Establishing -- an Update
- Quotes web site: Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back!
- Watch Tower sues Quotes for $100,000 plus plus plus...
- WTS vs Quotes: Requiem for a Research Web Site
Now, the update:
This afternoon, I finally received notice from my lawyer(s) that I am free to talk about Watch Tower's law suit against me:
We recently received word from Bereskin & Parr [the law firm hired by Watch Tower] that the Notice of Discontinuance had been filed with the Court on January 19, 2006. As such, you are now free to publicly comment on the action (and have been permitted to do so since January 19th). Unfortunately, despite our repeated follow-ups with Bereskin & Parr, they did not confirm the date of filing of the discontinuance with us until late last Friday. We will be sending you our account for services rendered shortly. The total value for fees, disbursements, and GST is $2,823.74. In accordance with the agreement between yourself and our firm, however, we will be reducing the total amount to $500.00, and will be closing our file once the account is rendered.[Note: I included the dollar amounts only to give people an idea of the costs involved. Now you can see what it might have cost -- if my lawyer had charged the full amount she could have -- for a "quick and simple" resolution, within 4 months, with little more than routine law firm paperwork. Can you imagine what the costs would have been if I decided to fight this, over the next several years?] Let me say this clearly for the record: my legal counsel did a great job and have mercifully chosen to reduce their expenses. I can't begin to express how thankful I am for this. In the hopes of sending them some business, or at least increasing their Google ranking, let me add this: in my opinion, J ohnston Wassenaar LLP is the best IP law firm in Canada. My wife and I are working on ways we can thank them (dinner? bottles of wine?), although I fear we will never be able to fully express our thanks. So, I am now free to comment (to the press, or whomever) on "the action". The Drew Marshall show has been asking me to make another appearance, and now I can -- and will. I will be contacting Drew ASAP and also contacting the other journalists I've spoken with over the past months. I will let you know if/when I'll be on the air or in print again. One remaining question: What do you think: So far, it appears that the "DNS" (Domain Name Server) entry for watchtower.ca has not been updated, so if you try the quotes web site URL, you still get my old server (with no files on it). This is not my fault. I no longer have any control over Watchtower.ca. Watch Tower Canada now owns watchtower.ca, and as the owners it is up to them to decide which web server you see when you type the URL into your web browser. They have been in control of watchtower.ca for about four weeks now. They could have made the DNS changes on the first day, and the change would have propagated through the internet by the second or third day. Obviously, they have not. Why have they not updated the DNS entry? Let me assume it is not simply gross incompetence (of the sort that left the domain available for me to register in November 2000 in the first place ). But what is their plan? Is this the internet equivalent of leaving my body impaled on a pike by the city gates? ~Quotes, of the "Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last" class