One Way to Pay Off the National Debt

On January 5, 2010, a company called CYBERsitter LLC, a Santa Barbara software company, sued the People’s Republic of China, two Chinese software makers – Zhendzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Ltd. and Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd., and seven major computer manufacturers – Sony, Lenovo, Toshiba, ACER, ASUSTeK Computer, and Haier – for misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition, copyright infringement and conspiracy.

The bottom line of the complaint is a request for $2.2 billion in actual damages. What is odd is that CYBERsitter is not asking for statutory damages – the type of damages that the usual copyright plaintiffs elect (for more info, GOOGLE “Joel Tenenbaum” or “Jammie-Rasset Thomas”). Instead, the Santa Barbara plaintiff arrived at its figure for actual damages by multiplying the cost of its infringed program ($39.95) by the number of infringing copies (around 56.5 million) – $2.2 billion.

As a side note (assuming CYBERsitter is eligible), if CYBERsitter elected to recover statutory damages, it would be able to collect somewhere between $11.3 billion ($200 per infringement) and $8.475 trillion ($30,000 per infringement). Why CYBERsitter would choose to recover less is beyond this author (unless CYBERsitter is ineligible). Considering our national debt is around $12.3 trillion, CYBERsitter could really do us all a solid favor by suing for statutory damages.

CYBERsitter is an internet filtering program that keeps net surfers from accessing certain websites.

This is one of the largest (non-frivolous) copyright suits that this author knows about, and it comes in the wake of the Chinese government’s attempted mandate of internet censorship. Last year, China decided that by July 1, 2009, all computers in the country would need to include a program called Green Dam. Before that critical date; however, some researchers from the University of Michigan discovered that the Green Dam program used approximately 3000 lines of code from the CYBERsitter program, and did so without the consent of the rights holders.

Green Dam was required to perform functions very similar to those of CYBERsitter, namely filtering. But China’s filters would not be limited to pornography and obscene material.

It was discovered (by the University of Michigan) that the program censored not just internet pornography and obscene material (China’s stated purpose for the inclusion of the Green Dam program), but also politically relevant content. Thus, a household in China would be blocked from viewing articles about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Falun Gong religious group, or one of around 6500 other politically oriented keywords. Not just material of a pornographic or obscene nature, like with CYBERsitter.

The backlash caused by the unveiling (by the University of Michigan) of the sovereign’s infringement as well its subversion of its own stated purpose has caused China to renege on its commitment to country-wide censorship of the internet. Thus, the Chinese government’s mandate of internet censorship software in all computers within the country did not meet its deadline of July 1, 2009.

If you are interested, check out the complaint or CYBERsitter’s press release.