Shawn Hogan the Hero! Standing up to the MPAA and has the money to put up a fight! LET THE NUKES FLY!!!!! Enemy pushes button first :)
This is they guy who is taking his MPAA lawsuit all the way to trial. The next paragraph is an echo of my comment in his blog.
They Don’t give a shit. They are using automated systems and assume that everybody is criminals. It is best to just be one. IP filters are very effective against P2P network spiders from data centers, but not deep packet sniffing or PI/FBI investigator on a personal internet connection with a dynamic IP. If you used an IP blocker and managed your server list (like favorite servers high prio, small servers low prio, rest normal prio, and set servers you trust to static and tell emule to connect only to servers on static list), you would of never ended up in their lawsuit lottery. Odds of getting a lawsuit are about the same as winning top prize on a scratcher…. You owning the DVDs already doesn’t matter to them. It is worse with the RIAA. They want you to buy the DVD again if you scratch it, lose it, or get it stolen (like getting your DVD case snatched from your checked luggage by airline baggage people or TSA baggage screeners). They actually prefer everybody socially engineered into pay-per-view.
I that if the case starts looking bad, he should start liquidating his assets. If he loses he still has to keep the MPAA from getting paid. I think his company is safe though. One can just ‘expense’ out some rent. I know a chick who’s husband expensed (write-off as a marketing expense to avoid personal or corporate income taxes) a half million dollars for a tripped-out F-350 (with basic wrecker gear to make it expensable). Whatever the case outcome, I think he should be a brave, but smart rebel, and keep using Emule and download whatever he wishes. Especially if there is moral (but not legal, but moral is enough for me) backing of ownership of ligit copies, even if it may be partial (it don’t look like the legit ownership backing is very partial by his blog - it is rather complete).
He got plenty of money and doesn’t want donations also. So I agree with donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). You also got the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and the Wikipedia, and numerous individual open-source projects also, such as Emule, BitTorrent, Azureus (The best BitTorrent Client), ZSNES (SNES emulator), Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, and SETI@Home (BOINC / Grid Computing). Also, if you prefer political donations, you have the pirate-parties - Pirate Party of the United States and Pirate Party Sweden. If he loses, he can donate his assets to any of these lovely charities instead of letting the MPAA collect and garnish them 
Only the FBI in terrorist or anti-spy mode can freeze a bank account in less than a day or two (The time it takes for a ACH transaction to go through). If he moves it to paypal first, then nobdoy could stop it unless they attack the EFF, FSF, Wikipedia, etc… also.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
one remark to your donations section:
“Azureus (The best BitTorrent Client)”
agreed with that definition, its a very very good client! (when it comes to an OS other then MSwindows)
On Windows you have now an Alternative that runs with much less memoryusage practicly without interupting you in your normal work in the background natively without extra java runtime that is even better then azureus.
This client is ?Torrent (www.utorrent.com). I’m sure that programmer would appriciate donations also