SLAPP Censorship - Part 38 Out of 200: Advertisement or £10,000+ Classified Ad in the Form of Court Filing in Another Continent
I'd not take the "extremely generous" offer (to censor information about the arrest and Microsoft wrongdoing implicating Microsoft's Nat Friedman, GitHub's CEO at the time)
In the previous part we said it was rather obvious (even a year ago or two years ago) that Garrett and Graveley had collaborated against my family, trying to drain out my wife's (and my own) legal budget for defence and counterclaims [1, 2] (details in this filing) while third parties funded them (Graveley had also received a lot of money from Microsoft, his employer when he was arrested).
In simple terms, I regard Graveley to be a "loser" and a "nutter" (or "nutcase" - a common insult in the US, where it's easy to hide behind "First Amendment!" to evade consequences after impersonating people and calling many people "rapist" hundreds of times in Twitter despite a total lack of evidence), based on his own track record of alcoholism and all sorts of other things. When it comes to defamation law, however, people like Graveley need to pretend to be super-important to have "a case" with "damages" (Graveley fancies himself some world-renown something, just like Garrett). So it was curious that his barrister mostly parroted what Graveley had said about himself. Below is my response, which deals with what Graveley claims to be.
IIIDefence
PARTIES
(for your own convenience, be it the Judge or any other party, a concise outline of responses to the claims is added in Appendix IX. However, anything below supersedes the outline and must be treated as primary response.)
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1.In respect of Paragraph 1, the first sentence is admitted, save that Alex Graveley has a “global reputation“ or has done work in “artificial intelligence”, somehow rendering him an expert. Unlike him, the Defendant did extensive research work in this field, including his doctoral degree as far back as more than 2 decades ago. The note on reputation is a matter of the Claimant’s own opinion of himself, which is deeply flawed both for technical and for personal reasons. I moreover refer to the Garrett Case. It's in many ways the same case, the same framing, the same claims. The formulation is similar. Put another way, Paragraph 1 of those Particulars of Claim is structurally identical to Paragraph 1 of the Graveley Claim, I therefore repeat Paragraph 1 of the Garrett Defence, which is enclosed. The same applies to many other paragraphs herein, so it would be very time-consuming (takes more time than the Barrister copy-pasting and adding a signature, which can also be copy-pasted) to match every identical/reused paragraph. If it is possible to put in the Defence a reference to a prior Defence, which comes from the same people, then it seems imperative to include it. A Judge can decide if such practices are to be tolerated; it seems like the goal is to make a pool of claims (10 pages long) with minimal effort, then wait and expect the Defendant to 'clean up the mess'. Nevertheless, here are some particulars. Regarding Alex Graveley’s alleged “global reputation“, Techrights wrote about poor programming by him as early as 2008 when it repeatedly wrote about an application he had developed, a GNOME-associated piece of software known as Tomboy. It not only created a dangerous reliance on Microsoft Mono, which is a software patent liability. That was alarming and factually applicable (not a false panic), especially at the time, a couple of years after the Microsoft-Novell patent deal, as Microsoft asserted that companies like Red Hat, which distributed GNU/Linux distributions, and even their larger clients owed Microsoft money for unspecified and unnamed software patents; this is a matter of public record and moreover, to quote Microsoft’s CEO, “[p]eople that use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us.” Techrights published many articles and videos about that at the time. Literally thousands of articles. Tomboy was not some innocuous application. It was, in effect, a dangerous legal trap and a selling point for Microsoft, as it advanced .NET and C# - monopolies Microsoft hoped to have gained – or to make matters even worse - strict controls over software developers worldwide (contrariwise, programming languages like C or C++ aren’t controlled by any vendor); Tomboy became a subject of heated controversy online and it earned a lot of scorn in news sites and forums; it also performed very poorly, as demonstrated when reimplemented by another developer using the C++ programming language (this was known as Gnote and was developed Hubert Figuière, a Novell employee at the time; the official repository says “Gnote started as a C++ port of Tomboy and has moved its own path later”). Gnote ended up improving its performance sixfold compared to Tomboy (according to some benchmarks as covered by Techrights nearly 17 years ago in many articles that were widely read and well received). That seems to imply that the developer of Tomboy, Mr. Graveley, had poor programming skills and produced inefficient, low-quality code – an observation shared by his ex-partner, who was also a software developer (she observed that his code was poorly made and far from elegant; his coding was sloppy, not tidy, and it inevitably impacted performance). Regarding, “artificial intelligence”, Mr. Graveley conveniently conflates plagiarism with “artificial intelligence”. Large Language Models (LLMs) do not have any real intelligence, they just try to emulate that by repeating text from people (i.e. real intelligence, humans with a grasp of what they say, not “stochastic parrots”). An LLM would merely tokenise sentences, process the tokens, and then use statistical inferences to produce – in generative form (output based on many inputs) – a bunch of words that may or may not make sense or sound coherent but nevertheless seem unique. The grammar seems OK, but there is no actual grasp of the words, hence it’s not intelligence. In reality, when Mr. Graveley asserts that he has reputation in “artificial intelligence” he means to say he helps Microsoft commit the largest-ever copyright infringement machine for code (not his own code, not Microsoft’s either), ingesting mountains of works of millions of software developers with neither permission nor much-needed (as per the accompanying licence) attribution or reciprocation, distribution-wise. Where the licence chosen was a “copyleft” licence (such as the General Public Licence), his work was - and still is - responsible for an extraordinary amount of copyright infringement. The term “genAI” is – to put it very bluntly – nonsense. Popular, sure, but still nonsense. Sometimes they instead say “advanced AI” or “agentic AI”, more so any time there’s negative press or as the hype seemingly ran out; they then speak of “superintelligence”, “AI arms race”, “AI era”, “AI revolution” etc. - all of them are loaded statements that make intentionally false suppositions. So disregard the buzzwords, catchphrases, and the hype behind “artificial intelligence” – neither a new thing nor what we actually deal with here – such mumbo-jumbo would only help distract from what really happens here. As Liam Proven from The Register (UK-based technology-centric publisher with a very large audience since the 1990s) put it in his blog on May. 20th, 2025, "AI" is not "AI". The liars and the shills redefined what people used to mean by "AI" as "AGI", artificial _general_ intelligence, so they could market their stupid plagiarism bots as AI. AGI is not real. It doesn't exist. It will probably never exist. Hell, at the rate humanity is going, we won't be able to build new computers any more by 2050 and the survivors at the poles will be nostalgic for electricity. AI is a scam. It's a hoax. It's fake news. There is no AI, and what is being sold as AI is such an incredibly poor fake that it is profoundly disheartening that so many people are so stupid to be deceived into thinking it is AI.” The extent and importance of this copyright infringement, now the subject of a gigantic class-action lawsuit against Microsoft (where Mr. Graveley technically worked when he was in prison for strangling women; the police’s formal records confirm that), will be explored later in this Defence. To say more about “global reputation”, before Mr. Graveley was even covered in Techrightts women had already complained that he was sexually abusive, told them to kill themselves, and even his associates knew (they also admitted this in private) that he was a bad, vile person. Not only did his friends know it; that had already become widespread knowledge all around the world; hence, Techrights has nothing to do with any alleged harm to his reputation, which was already severely harmed because of 1) his own behaviour and colleagues’ impression 2) other people reporting – even in public sometimes – his bad behaviour, complemented with crude, unflattering evidence that he was unable to deny (it was authentic). Other than Tomboy, it is not clear what work he did in free software that would earn him any real reputation; as argued in Techrights many years ago, Tomboy was in fact a menace and a threat to Free (as in Open Source or Freedom-respecting) software, meaning freely-shareable as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Tomboy was widely perceived as an unwanted liability for some of the aforementioned reasons, among several others. In many cases, Tomboy alone was the reason why GNU/Linux distributions (also known as Free Operating Systems) were unable to remove the chain of Mono dependencies, thus severely complicating things from a licensing perspective. Not only did Microsoft purchase Mono from Xamarin (or prior to that Novell and Ximian); it also hired the people who made and promoted Mono, i.e. Mr. Graveley and his friends, colleagues, collaborators. It’s not difficult to argue that they served Microsoft all along, i.e. they effectively worked for Microsoft for several decades. As for GNU/Linux distributions that preload Mono, usually against their will (it’s technically hard to remove), some of them spoke about the matter and some went out of their way to remove it, despite it being a difficult task (a distribution called “Netrunner” did that). Tomboy was a core issue or the “cancer” that metastasised. It put them at risk of being sued by Microsoft. Not too long beforehand, Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft evangelist, wrote: "I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue". For many GNU/Linux distributions which came with the GNOME desktop environment (basically a user interface that graphically interacts with the user) it was virtually impossible to get rid of the aforementioned lawsuit threat because of Mr. Graveley’s work. This subject was revisited several times in Techrights in 2021 and in 2022. Mr. Graveley never challenged any of the publications related to this, dating back to 2008. Regarding the second sentence in Paragraph 1, this is partly fiction and partly an aggrandising, self-congratulating fantasy. Mr. Graveley likes to portray himself as “founder” of things and when he gets hired by a company he describes it as a takeover or acquisition. This helps him fabricate so-called wealth (which he lacks; he used to get emotional about other people having nice cars, unlike him), brag about it to women, and then admit to them that it was all in vain and merely meant to impress them. “Hackpad” is obscure, he went to work for Dropbox (with some software patents ‘in the bag’) and it’s said that he lost that job due to poor interactions with workers there (former colleagues confirm he had severe social issues and was abusive towards women in particular), albeit that allegation is more challenging to verify or to present in the form of a disclosed testimony. At GitHub he got a job because his longtime friend (and some allege “best friend”, according to them, they even did a whole podcast together) had worked for Microsoft since the 1990s and when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018, appointing that “best friend” as CEO (although it was merely a Microsoft subsidiary, so it’s like an honorary role) it was convenient for him to bring in a friend. At GitHub Mr. Graveley did not do “AI”, he did plagiarism with LLMs (created by an entirely different company!) and it’s alleged he now faces subpoenas for his role in that controversial - and potentially illegal - project. As George V. Neville-Neil put it in 2024 in “The Drunken Plagiarists” (published in the reputable ACM), “my favorite feature of co-pilot programs is the abject plagiarism. We already know that the text and code being typed out by these things comes from scanning billions of lines of text and source code available in GitHub, but they can even be helpful in unintended ways. A colleague who was taking a night class in distributed systems showed me what happened when his professors (foolishly) suggested the students "use the new tools" in order to become more modern developers. As he accepted more and more of the co-pilot's suggestions, he noticed a pattern: It was as if someone was typing in another file from somewhere else. The coding style itself was one of the clues, but eventually the co-pilot gave itself away completely by saying, "You know there is a file just like this over in this other repo?" In a way, this makes sense. But as part of a homework exercise, it's just hilarious. The more I've used these tools in my projects, the more I've realized that co-pilots are nothing more than drunken plagiarists, sitting behind you and your code with their hot, gin-soaked breath whispering semantic nothings in your ear. They are not a boon to your work, they are a rubber crutch?one that will cruelly let you down when you need it most. Now, we all just need to get real work done while we wait for this latest hype cycle to die a justified and fiery death.” As for MobileCoin, it is another passing fad riding the hype wave of so-called ‘crypto’ currency (it’s neither crypto nor currency; those are nothing short of Ponzi schemes sold on misnomers and supposedly “too complicated to understand” cryptic ‘logic’) and Techrights previously covered several aspects in relation to MobileCoin, including – potentially – plagiarism. The theme of plagiarism shall be revisited a lot in this Defence as it seems to be a motivating factor in pursuit of this meritless, vexatious legal claim in a continent the Claimant never resided in, maybe due to these matters being covered almost exclusively in Techrights (UK), where the authors have a good technical and legal grasp of the key issues. The last sentence in Paragraph 1 says Mr. Graveley “serves as CEO of Minion AI”, which is again an exaggeration and way too self-aggrandising a statement. As even the official site of “Minion AI” makes abundantly clear, there is almost nothing to this company. This is just an example of names and one-man operations being describes as some large franchise. Much like Hackpad. This is another recurring theme. It’s also quite revealing, based on his own E-mails, that he does not have a job, struggles to find a job, or is unable to keep a job. In short, Paragraph 1 is just a lot of self-flattery, revisionism, and compliments one gives to oneself to impress observers or stroke one’s ego. It was noted by ex-partners that this is a severe issue of character, maybe trying to compensate for a lack of confidence by acting like a megalomaniac. The reputation of this person has been bad for a long time (before Techrights wrote about it), he does not have a good academic track record, he does not really work in “AI” (plagiarism is a more appropriate description of what he did at Microsoft), he claims to be known for selling himself to a company where he worked only briefly, and he now runs a humble Web site with an “app” of which he describes his relationship to as “CEO”. The last sentence is not admitted as it is intentionally misleading. It is acceptable to say that Mr. Graveley is a “software developer and programmer”. That’s about it. The first sentence is admitted save for the Claimant’s description of himself as having a “global reputation” which is denied as being a good reputation, let alone in the fields named therein. The remaining sentences are all not admitted. I will repeatedly reject the allusions that 1) this is “AI”; 2) this so-called “AI” has any real merit or importance. As Baidu’s CEO put it in late 2024, 99% of so-called ‘AI’ companies won’t survive after the bubble bursts. This includes “CoPilot”, which according to press reports not only loses a lot of money (the energy usage cannot be offset by subscription fees) but also attracts expensive lawsuits to it. Even for every paid subscriber (i.e. person signing up to plagiarism) Microsoft loses a considerable amount of money in operational costs. If this was a standalone company, it would be deemed insolvent, hence bankrupt in due course. As Cory Doctorow put it in his article in 2023, this is all without merit and so-called ‘AI’ “is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. […] Contrast that bubble with, say, cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. The expensively retrained physicists whom the finance sector taught to generate wildly defective risk-hedging algorithms were not able to apply that knowledge to create successor algorithms that were useful. The fraud of the cryptocurrency bubble was far more pervasive than the fraud in the dotcom bubble, so much so that without the fraud, there’s almost nothing left. A few programmers were trained in Rust, a very secure programming language that is broadly applicable elsewhere. But otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.” Bubbles, deceit, plagiarism, false marketing and Ponzi schemes seem more suitable a description of this man’s legacy. MobileCoin is just another example of fake ‘money’ or so-called ‘cryptocurrency’ – i.e. something bound to collapse. Quoting Wikipedia: “MobileCoin began its affiliation with FTX in 2021 after FTX's sister company Alameda Research participated in MobileCoin's Series B investment round. In 2021, MobileCoin played a role in the financial collapse of FTX. A buyer on the FTX platform purchased a large amount of MobileCoin, artificially driving up the price, and then borrowed against it on FTX. The platform had to buy out the trader to protect itself, and survived thanks to a loan from sister company Alameda Research, resulting in a loss as great as $1 billion. In April 2022, MobileCoin cohosted a happy hour with FTX at Crypto Bahamas 2022.” One might say that Mr. Graveley still boasts about his affiliation or ties with the above affairs, connected to white-collar crime. The company’s Chief Product Officer was murdered in 2023. To reiterate: Save that it is admitted that the Claimant is known as Mr. Graveley, it is not admitted that he is anything he claims to be, and denied that he earned what he asserts/acclaims. The deeper the objective analysis goes, the more abundantly clear this shall become. Regarding some of the supposed reputation, there is no evidence provided. So a non-admission may be more suitable here, meaning that such as allegation might be true - not only in the mind of the Claimant - but the Claimant has to prove it is true. Moreover, that must be proven in the context of the UK. This case was brought in a British court. The case must be dealt with based on its true scope. Mr. Graveley understands this. Whereas he would rather pretend that it's of a "global" nature. Particulars are needed here, not just from the Defendant. The burden is also on the Claimant.
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