Lee Kun-Hee, Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics and a criminal (picture from Gizmodo)
ONE of the companies which we urge/called for a boycott against is Samsung, which puts a Microsoft tax on Linux and Android. We have only just discovered that in addition to Samsung's history of fraud there is also a vicious attempt to silence critics. Here is this new example:
Samsung Sues Satirist, Claiming Criminal Defamation, Over Satirical Column Poking Fun At Samsung
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As satire goes, it seems pretty tame (and, really, not that funny). But, Samsung went ballistic, suing Breen, the Korea Times and its top editor for both civil and criminal libel charges. Supposedly, after Korea Times ran a "clarification" that was written by Samsung itself, the paper and its editor were dropped from the lawsuit, but the suit against Breen remains. And, since there are criminal charges, not only could he face hefty fines (perhaps $1 million), he might also face jailtime. For writing a satirical Christmas day column. Tough audience.
The South Korean electronics giant's libel suit against a British columnist shows both the power of corporate conglomerates and a different view of defamation, satire and free speech.
I own a Samsung BD-C5500 Blu Ray Disc player:
In the Support section, it offers to show you the licenses for all the free and open source software they used, which happens to be most of the software on their Blu Ray player, the GPL/LGL software alone includes:
Linux kernel, Busybox, Binutils, wireless_tools, uClibc, directfb, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto2, libusb, libiconv, libmms.
