My old attorney

Wednesday, April 11, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I don't think my old attorney blogs, but maybe he should. Maybe by the time we're done with all our michegas, he will.  

A few days ago I posted a proposal, in public, to try to get a dialog going.  

In that proposal, I tried to see things from his point of view, but also try to be fair to myself. 

I like to figure out what's right, and then do the right thing. I don't want anything I'm not entitled to. 

I did all the work to create weblogs.com, and took all the risk, and withstood all the flaming -- and I also invented it (unlike RSS, weblogs.com was invented), so it might seem fair that I get all the proceeds. (I did all that without getting a salary from UserLand, all my time was at my own expense.) 

But UserLand did help, it registered the domain for me (something we did for anyone in our community who wanted us to, back then domain registration wasn't so easy), and I did run the site on one of its servers, so let's, for the sake of argument, assume that UserLand did own it when it was transferred to me in 2003. That was the starting point for my proposal. I think we can easily arrive at a fair solution, shake hands and go forth and do our respective things.  

So here we are at a fork in the road. As far as I'm concerned the proposal is still on the table. And it's a starting point. If they feel I've missed something, then I want to know what it is.  

But -- today I thought about what it would be like to go through depositions and a trial. I can do it. I blogged Jury Duty and got something from it, and so did my readers. Maybe I'll write a book from the inside of the legal process, I suspect there will be plenty to write about. Sure it'll cost money -- but I have money. I believe in being fair, to others, and to myself.