Twelve days after filing a lawsuit against two programmers who revealed the sites blocked by its Internet filtering software program CyberPatrol, toy company Mattel changed its strategy and reached an out-of-court settlement with the pair. As part of an agreement filed 25 minutes before a court hearing was to begin March 27, Mattel announced that the programmers had turned over their intellectual-property rights to the “cphack” utility they had created. The Associated Press reported March 28 that Mattel was now threatening any other Web sites distributing the program with prosecution for copyright violation.
U.S. District Judge Edward F. Harrington issued a permanent injunction the next day against any Web sites acting “in active concert” with cphack authors Eddy Jansson and Matthew Skala, according to a March 29 AP report.
But Chris Hansen, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, which was defending three U.S. Web site operators in the original lawsuit, told reporters that the judge’s order did not make it clear whether sites mirroring the program were affected. “We’re disappointed by the fact that we don’t have clarity,” he said. “We’re also disappointed that CyberPatrol is going to continue to try to hide [information] from the public.”
Posted April 3, 2000.