As we wend our way through the twisty legal passages, all alike, we all
appreciate your e-mail and thoughts on the legal case itself.

Update: HarvardNet dropped their lawsuit, "without prejudice".
This means they can restart it at any time. This sucks. But it's
where things stand for the moment. We'll let you know if any other
hassles come from them.

When HarvardNet sued us for over $120,000 for printing the hostname (just the hostname, mind you) of their firewall, we naturally scoffed at the idea of giving them one worthless stock option. No, we sweated out the night and then got advice to acquire the services of Lucy Lovrien, Boston Lawyer and Defender of Truth.

Lucy does a whole host of services in legal matters and she gladly took on our case, collected six (!!) affidavits in our defense, wrote up an incredible body-slam of a legal brief, and laid Hale and Dorr low at the preliminary hearing that had been scheduled one week (!!!) after we were served papers. And wouldn't you know, that lame-ass Restraining Order was lifted, and Hale and Dorr dropped the suit. Noooooot baaaaad.

Here's Lucy's Contact Info. Maybe she can do something for you, should you need help.

Lucy D. Lovrien
Attorney at Law
185 Devonshire St.
Boston, MA
617-423-3020

Late last week (around Friday, the 17th), we got a letter from Hale and Dorr (HarvardNet's lawyers) informing us that HarvardNet was dropping its lawsuit "without prejudice". This means that at any time they could reinstate their lawsuit against us, ostensibly if we look at them funny or say the wrong thing. They weren't kind enough to send us a list of acceptable subjects, although they might do so in the future.

We understand that the impulse on the part of our faithful reading public is that of celebration and thinking that we "Won". However, if you found yourself suddently drafted into a baseball game against major-league players, and they came out with machine guns and shot random members of your team before forfeiting the game, you might not feel like much of a winner, either.

Many thanks to Lucy Lovrien, our always-smiling crack legal staff who has knocked herself out composing excellent responses and documents associated with this whole insane mess. Let us know if you want to hire her. She's good.

Thanks to the fact that HarvardNet couldn't operate a simple telephone or send us an e-mail with their concerns, we've lost a month we're never going to get back.

HarvardNet Sucks.

Here's all the pages from Judge Houston's decision about the temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction. It's a wonderful blow for our side; the judge indicates that the information is NOT a trade secret or proprietary, that the information COULD be found in public, and that we didn't need to be stopped from printing the information. Click on each page number to see a scanned image. We highlighted the more interesting passages in yellow, but you can read it all, if you'd like.

This event was a hearing to respond to the temporary restraining order requested by HarvardNet for information posted to the site. We're very sad that HarvardNet chose to sue us instead of sending us a simple e-mail with any complaints they had. We're also kind of scared to post anything critical of HarvardNet on this site because they might sue us again; a nice chill for this autumn season.

If anyone at HarvardNet is listening, try giving us a call next time, OK?

The Staff of HARVARDNETSUCKS.COM would appreciate your support and good thoughts during this trying time, and encourage you to let others know of this site if you think it would be informative to them.

The following showed up at one of our staff members' homes yesterday, along with a lot of attached paper. You're all invited to come.