It's a pretty awful thing to do on the part of the other company, but it should not be illegal. If Summit played it smart they could easily trash any kind of reputation this other company has (after all, people are repulsed by this kind of 'theft'). And I can't help but think this is partially Summits fault, there are all kinds of contracts/NDA's that can be used for precisely these situations, to stop a company stealing your idea. And to say that Summit did not have these options available to them, or that they did not know about them is pure folly. If they had a pre-existing contract they could easily sue over that, have a much stronger claim and potentially get much greater damages, instead they've gone for some comparatively weak claims due to their own incompetence in failing to set up some kind of 'you can't copy this idea' contract'...
I think these people have really been grasping at straws for quite some time now - 'ISPs rely on file sharing for money'? What kind of morons are they?
Bandwidth costs ISPs money. Heavy file sharers often use more bandwidth and therefore cost ISPs more then your regular, average customer. ISPs make their money on the difference between the bandwidth they sell you and how much you actually use, which is why so many 'unlimited' plans have such limited usage policies. ISPs do not want you to use lots of bandwidth which is why they regularly throttle file-sharers, they want you to pay for a 10GB per/month account and use 10mb, what orifice did the BPI get their 'facts' that ISPs make money from file sharing? In my experience most file-sharers are more likely to use more bandwidth and be savvy enough to only pay for the bandwidth they use, exactly the opposite of what ISPs want.
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It's a pretty awful thing to do on the part of the other company, but it should not be illegal. If Summit played it smart they could easily trash any kind of reputation this other company has (after all, people are repulsed by this kind of 'theft'). And I can't help but think this is partially Summits fault, there are all kinds of contracts/NDA's that can be used for precisely these situations, to stop a company stealing your idea. And to say that Summit did not have these options available to them, or that they did not know about them is pure folly. If they had a pre-existing contract they could easily sue over that, have a much stronger claim and potentially get much greater damages, instead they've gone for some comparatively weak claims due to their own incompetence in failing to set up some kind of 'you can't copy this idea' contract'...
I think these people have really been grasping at straws for quite some time now - 'ISPs rely on file sharing for money'? What kind of morons are they?
Bandwidth costs ISPs money. Heavy file sharers often use more bandwidth and therefore cost ISPs more then your regular, average customer. ISPs make their money on the difference between the bandwidth they sell you and how much you actually use, which is why so many 'unlimited' plans have such limited usage policies. ISPs do not want you to use lots of bandwidth which is why they regularly throttle file-sharers, they want you to pay for a 10GB per/month account and use 10mb, what orifice did the BPI get their 'facts' that ISPs make money from file sharing? In my experience most file-sharers are more likely to use more bandwidth and be savvy enough to only pay for the bandwidth they use, exactly the opposite of what ISPs want.