Tynaeris, Ganymede, Jupiter Space -- 22 Apr. 2057: The Ganymede Regional Criminal Court this day sentenced defendant Cormorant Lyndstrom to memory excision for his role in the dissemination of intellectual property belonging to the shareholders of Omnicor Hypercorp LLC. The court chose to impose a particularly severe sentence, ordering that not only the IP itself, but the skills required to illegally copy and distribute it as well as the beliefs which motivated Mr. Lyndstrom to commit the felony should also be erased. This is the heaviest penalty yet to be levied in an IP-theft trial, and was justified by the Honourable Judge Beatrix Mallory as being appropriate due to "the egregious, deliberate, and crippling damage done to the value of Omnicor shareholders' investments".
Cormorant Lyndstrom, a former employee in the software engineering department of Omnicor subsidiary Ultramax Software Dynamics, was proved during the trial to have engraved his neural tissue with memory engrams containing proprietary software code for over 1000 Omnicor-owned programs, many of which are in common use throughout the system. Among the best known of the stolen programs are Ultramax MetaWake, a neural optimization system popular among users with heavy neural interlink protocols, and Ultramax Rapids, an emergent data traffic control utility which is given free (in encrypted form) to public utilities but will only interface with other proprietary Ultramax software. Lyndstrom, who has since confessed to membership in the Pirate Party and become the public face of the information-freedom movement in Jupiter Space, then uploaded the source code through a number of black underlayer protocols which distributed them to anonymous data caches throughout the hyperlayer. Although Omnicor is pursuing strenuous legal actions in an attempt to have the programs expunged, a number of districts with more Libertarian or Anarchist sympathies are explicitly refusing to allow the code to be taken down and many others are dragging their heels, doubtless not wanting to expend the immense amount of effort and political capital which such a thorough and somewhat pointless hyperlayer purge would require. According to a statement released by Lyndstrom under the aegis of the Pirate Party, "the information which Omnicor tried and failed to control has been let loose from its bonds, and can no longer be chained. It has seeded in a million offline storage caches; it will flower throughout the hyperlayer ecosystem and fruit into new and innovative software which will be of much greater value to society than the pale hothouse flowers kept by Omnicor in its walled garden."
Lyndstrom is widely expected to appeal his conviction to the Superior Criminal Court. Dr. Wembly McCcarrington, a professor of IP law at Stross University, believes that Lyndstrom's audacious crime and subsequent capture and trial may in fact have been a political maneuver on behalf of the Pirate Party. "Think about it," Dr. McCarrington urged in an audio interview. "The man didn't even make an effort to erase the memory engrams that proved his guilt, to avoid the Omnicor Corporate Police or to cover his tracks in any way. Every move of this was calculated to enrage the Corporatists and get them calling for his head. And now, the Pirates have a perfect test case to throw to the Superior Court, which is newly flush with Technocrat-appointed judges and likely to take a dim view of such a blatant use of state power to protect corporate interests."
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