Fake Steve Jobs In Legal Fight Over Punchline by in News / November 14th, 2007
In a case sure to make headlines around the world, Fake Steve Jobs has been sued by the the editors of Push the Third Button Twice over the theft of a punchline published earlier today. Lawyers for PTTBT described the crime as “malicious, dastardly and downright snotty.”
The suit centres around a series of posts which FSJ ran on his blog beginning at 5:10AM PST, covering the recent announcement by John C. Dvorak that he would give up using Windows. Subsequent posts went on to suggest that the heads of organizations such as Apple, Microsoft, Ubuntu and Red Hat were all trying to avoid Dvorak’s attention, trying to convince him to adopt someone else’s OS.
“That gag is amazingly similar to what we ran a few hours later,” said Richard Malcolm, editor-in-chief of PTTBT. “So either we both thought of the same joke at the same time, or FSJ has a time machine.”
After consulting with PTTBT’s technology editor, Damen Peamu, it was decided that Fake Steve Jobs had, in fact, used a new feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard called “Time Machine” to read RSS feeds from the future, thereby stealing other sites’ thunder. In legal terms, this is called “prognosticatory intellectual property theft”, an area of the justice system usually reserved for Amazon.com and other patent trolls.
“That Fake Steve Jobs would use Time Machine in such an undocumented way is morally corrupt,” said Wilson Meyer, attorney for PTTBT, “I mean, I can’t even get it to sync to a drive over Airport, and here he is using it to see into the future. Shameless.”
Representatives for Apple seemed confused and bemused when asked for comment on the suit, which was filed this afternoon in Fake San Diego district court. The suit demands $15.35 in damages and instructions on how to use the Time Machine feature to read CNN finance RSS feeds from the future.
