Throwing Money at Lawyers Can't Stop Us (It Never Did)
10 years ago (2015) the corrupt EPO tried lawyering up against us and it backfired because we'd spent the next 10+ years writing even more about EPO corruption and we're told that almost everybody at the EPO now reads us. It was an own goal by EPO managers. They legitimised us by attacking us.
The EPO took not one but several law firms, including very large ones, which didn't hide the fact they had been spying on me and would carry on spying on me. That didn't scare me; it just motivated me to write even more about them.
Lawyering up is a tactic which works against particular types of people and organisations. Every pound spent on a lawyer can end up costing more than just money; it can result in embarrassment and persistent humiliation. This may be self-defeating, even if it's not initially obvious.
When Daniel Pocock spoke about Google (et al) spending about $120,000 trying to shut him up it ended up giving him more political clout and when Google "censored" his talk it ended up emerging again the following year. Now it cannot be censored anymore. We made a copy and we don't censor anything.
Similarly, attacking the fork of X results in even more "free" (as in freedom) publicity for Xlibre - the very opposite of what IBM sought by censoring/banning its lead developer.
I wasn't born yesterday. I know that censoring things tends to backfire. Even just trying to censor things can result in the opposite of the desired outcome.
Modern, civilised, democratic societies embolden the people who speak truth to power, not the power that speaks through opportunistic lawyers to truth-tellers. █
