Reply #140: No, it's not true

[Eloriel]

Certainly not the qui tam part. And IMO to have ever suspected Cindy Cohen (I think it is) of filing a qui tam is -- well, ridiculous and insulting.

As I recall --

Cindy recommended two sites to Bev, one of which is owned by one of Electronic Frontier Foundation's board members and the other was Bartcop's. Personally, I'm not a Bartcop fan so that wouldn't have been palatable to me either were I making those decisions. OTOH, Bartcop had apparently demonstrated strength in the face of such types of legal challenges in the past, and EFF trusted him.

The purpose for this suggested move was to ensure the site would NOT be subject to the vagaries of some site owner getting spooked about legal challenges such as DMCA.

As I've posted elsewhere, it was very clear to me at the time that Bev simply didn't understand what was going on, and wasn't listening to anyone, nor was she about to listen.

Let's be clear. There WERE good reasons for some of the activists heavily involved in this issue at that time to be a little paranoid. Three mysterious house break-ins all in one week, break lines cut another week, etc. And I can also say from personal experience that when you have to go into distrust mode, sometimes it's difficult to sort out who to be distrustful of and who not. I personally had to pull myself back from the brink of unreasonable distrustfulness a couple of times. So I could understand the instinct Bev had to go into severe distrust mode over what was happening -- what I found much more difficult to understand was blaming responsible and credible people (e.g., Cindy Cohen -- who is an attorney, btw) for attempting to undermine her, including people who had been working with her for months, not to mention refusing to listen to those same people in any way. As I said elsewhere, she was pretty much "unreachable" at that point.