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December 4, 2006: Activity on Motions and Copyright

On November 9th, Katzer filed his Memorandum in Opposition to our motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent further violations of the copyright in the JMRI decoder definition files. Included with it was a declaration by Matt Katzer. He argues that he shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of KAM Industries, his company, and repeated the previous arguments that copyright law doesn't apply. Katzer also argued that he had stopped distributing any products with JMRI materials, and thus the Court should not order him to stop infringing.

Not that it matters - once someone breaks the law and has shown that he will continue to, he can't get out of an injunction just by saying that he stopped breaking the law. Nevertheless, we tried to confirm whether Katzer was telling the truth, but his product wouldn't work and so we couldn't tell if he had stopped using JMRI copyrighted materials.

On November 17th, we filed a reply to this, along with declarations from Paul Bender, Bob Jacobsen (exhibits) and Alex Shepherd (exhibits), to set the record straight.

Also on November 17th, Katzer filed his reply to our memorandum opposing his motions to dismiss. He backed off his challenge to our copyright right claim - at least for the time being.

On December 4th, we filed a Motion for Leave to File Surreply to Defendant's Reply Memorandum. This is the legal mechanism to ask the Court to file a response to a Reply brief. Normally, once the Reply has been filed, the parties can't file anything else. However, under certain circumstances, the Court will consider a 'Surreply'. We believe that because Katzer misstated case law and brought up new facts that we should be permitted to respond to those, which is why we sought 'leave' (that is, permission) to file the Surreply and then attached the Surreply. The Court will first decide whether to consider it, and if so, then take it into account.

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