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Acacia have already made millions of dollars with an ultimately unsuccessful copyright claim. Which is the very reason that they are back again. And if they make a profit from their current claim, they will come back for a third bite, then a fourth.
If Acacia are not stopped, then somewhere along the line there will be other Acacias. While no single claim may involve a critical added cost, the cumulative effect could be another story entirely.
I doubt that logic has escaped any of the companies which have settled with Acacia. IMO all these companies knowingly took the easy way out, expecting that eventually someone else would deal with the issue properly, as Sony etc., did in the V-Chip case.
You can say they made a business decision that was in their own best interests. And if you ignore the probability that without the profits from similarly motivated settlements over V-Chip, we would not be discussing Acacia today, their decisions make sense. To them. But now we come to the issue of affiliates supporting companies that have settled.
Acacia has shown a willingness to come after everyone: paysites large and small; AVS/AEN operators and webmasters; affiliates; all of us. In other words, we all need someone to defeat Acacia. Not just to make the streaming media issue go away, but to prove to others that there is no profit in this type of claim.
Against that background I simply don't see any reason to support companies that have settled, when I can earn just as much money from other programs. It isn't often that you can defend a principle without it costing anything, so why not make the most of it...
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