In November of 1995 I put up a personal home page, just for fun. The page was pretty much content-free, just a main page, with a little table, with links to subpages with links on different subjects.

I had a lot links of novelty stuff on the fun & strange subpages, Hillary's Hair, Walter Cronkite Spit in My Food, Talk to the Cat...

On the free software page I had a few links to some shareware programs I liked, and some big shareware sites like Oak and Jumbo, no different from a milllion other pages.

I also had one subpage with links to pages about Hacking & Cracking, Viruses, Encryption, Security, etc...

That page got pretty popular, and as I learned more and began to make pages for other people, I put a little scrollit on the page as an ad for my web design services.

I was just starting to get clients, and was feeling pretty optimistic about the future, when on September 26 I got a call from my ISP. He told me that he had received a call from a representative of the Software Publishers Association, and that this gentleman had said that my home page constituted a copyright violation, and demanded that my ISP give him all my personal information, cancel my account immediately, and destroy all of my pages.

To his credit, my ISP refused to compromise my privacy, and did not cancel my account, but did remove every directory I had created on the system, including images, like backgrounds and divider bars, and workfiles containing pages I was making for clients.

Neither he nor I had enough money to hire a lawyer, so even if what the SPA said wasn't true, he felt like he had no choice.

They said he could avoid legal action by signing their ISP Code of Conduct, which requires ISP's to monitor subscribers' communications for signs of possible copyright violation, and to remove any pages that contained links to anything that might contain or link to something that might have a possible copyright violation.

I was never told exactly what the SPA objected to. I've assumed it could have been something on the "Hack & Crack Links" page, but it could've been the link to Hillary's Hair, for all I know.

There never were any copyright violations on the site. There were no files on the server. It was just a page of links.

Since this all happened, I've had a lot of time to think. Work has slowed down quite a bit, as you might imagine. Simply making a new page is a complicated proposition. Part of the agreement my ISP signed requires that my former urls contain a notice that the pages have been removed because they violated the copyright laws.

I couldn't do that, because it would not be true, but I did put a notice that the pages have been removed because they contained information the SPA does not want you to see. I couldn't be more specific about what information, because I don't know.

I included a link to their site, as I believe is also required by the agreement. Any new url I put on that server would be subject to the terms of the agreement, which limits pretty severely what I could put a link to.

The major search engines are out, since people could conceivably use those to locate sites which might contain or link to sites that contain copyright violations, although I'm not aware of the SPA threatening any of those large companies with any legal action.

The only way to avoid taking a chance is to link only to pages whose content and links you control. There's no way I can know for sure, if I link to Disney.com today, that they wont't put up a page of ftp links containing copyrighted software tomorrow. And if they wanted to, I couldn't stop them.

It seems like, if the goal of the SPA is, as they say, to stop piracy, that their efforts would be better directed toward sites that contain copyright violations. It's hard to imagine that they are not aware of ftp search.

If links to "Hack and Crack" pages are a concern, I wonder why they haven't started litigation against Netscape, yahoo, alta vista, and all the major search engines.

When I talked to Art Kramer, prior to the little news story in the Atlanta paper, he advised me of their policy not to quote people without using their real names.

As I told him, not only do I not have money for a lawyer; I don't have money for a bodyguard either.

I haven't gotten a very positive impression of the SPA; I'm not willing to bet anything as precious as my family's safety on their being entirely up and up, squeaky clean and ethical.

I feel a little naive for not realizing that it is perfectly legal to call people and threaten them with legal action if you don't do what they tell you to.

It's not considered extortion, nor is it considered making terroristic threats. At least, not if you have plenty of money for lawyers.

For people who don't spend most of their lives on the net, it may sound strange to put so much importance on a web page.

It may sound overly dramatic to use words like "violated" to describe the destruction of a few lines of HTML and Javascript, the deletion of a meg or so of images.

Those who do spend most of their lives in front of the screen will understand perfectly.

I worked hard on my page, improving it, keeping it up to date; I was proud of it. I included it in my signature. I got work from people who saw and admired it.

I understand that there are a growing number of mirrors of it, in various places around the globe. The sun never sets on it. It is the world's page now.