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Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

orca.security

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Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#21

Post by dylan604 »

robertab wrote: post #11

I'm curious as to what Palo Alto is concerned about with these videos. If they feel they are mis-represented, they can easily post their own videos in response. But no doubt, transparency is a necessity and cease-and-desist letters does no one any good.

Huh? If it causes the video giving bad reviews of their product to be taken down, the C&D letter does a lot of good for Palo Alto. Even if the review is accurate, if Palo Alto can force the review to go away it is a good day's work for that lawyer.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#22

Post by kazen44 »

guardiangod wrote: post #10
orca-pp wrote: post #5

With NSS Labs shutting down today the need for objectivity and visibility into testing has never been greater.

I know no one cares about NSS Labs but as an employee of a NSS-tested company I'd like to say RIP. No one does testing as rigorously as you, and thanks for all the headaches you've caused my teams. (Gartner is a joke. There, I said it.)

NSS labs was one of the few labs which actually did rigorous testing in regards to firewall performance. It helped me and my company enourmously with both recommending solutions to customers aswell as troubleshooting. Mainly by providing a truthfull baseline compared to the datasheet of the vendor. all firewall vendors seem to basically lie on their datasheet in regards to real life performance. This becomes a real pain in the arse when you start seeing performance issues or weird behaviour because you actually run a firewall "to spec".

a good example of this was a cisco asa with firepower (which in itself ia a terrible solution, but alas). even at "just" 50% of the specced load, we started seeing weird issues in regards to IPsec tunnels. (SA's randomly dropping, getting abysmal performance at certain times etc).

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#23

Post by CapitalistCartr »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
trentnix wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Many lawyers threaten and posture for a living. Don't let their empty threats bully you into submission if you've done nothing wrong.

How do you tell whether you're doing something wrong or not without spending money on your own lawyer?

My wife went to law school. I know lots of lawyers. The spread between Justin (first in his class by a fat margin), and the bottom, oh, say, quarter of the class, is brutal.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#24

Post by zufallsheld »

cycop wrote: post #9

The letter is about using Palo Alto Networks trademarks on their website. I think Orca should just change their review to say "Palo Crapo Networks" .... issue solved

It's says "orcas comparison and rating of prisma and its public dissemination is a clear breach of...", so not just a trademark issue.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#25

Post by ryandrake »

trentnix wrote: post #16
pavel_lishin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you tell whether you're doing something wrong or not without spending money on your own lawyer?

That presumes a lawyer will give you good legal advice. I've been given poor legal advice before by a lawyer, and been given even worse tactical advice. I've gone against a lawyer's recommendations before when their explanation and recommendation did not jive with my reading and understanding. You should educate yourself and seek counsel if you believe you need it. Because ultimately the situation is no different tha…

Can you expand on how one would educate themselves on this (besides getting a law degree), and how one would determine that they need legal counsel, besides having this vague feeling that they need it? Are there some rules of thumb that a normal, non-lawyer can follow to roughly gauge the seriousness of a written legal threat?

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#26

Post by trentnix »

ryandrake wrote: post #25
trentnix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes a lawyer will give you good legal advice. I've been given poor legal advice before by a lawyer, and been given even worse tactical advice. I've gone against a lawyer's recommendations before when their explanation and recommendation did not jive with my reading and understanding. You should educate yourself and seek counsel if you believe you need it. Because ultimately the situation is no different tha…

Can you expand on how one would educate themselves on this (besides getting a law degree), and how one would determine that they need legal counsel, besides having this vague feeling that they need it? Are there some rules of thumb that a normal, non-lawyer can follow to roughly gauge the seriousness of a written legal threat?

Hopefully someone more educated than me will chime in, but inevitably a C&D or some other lawyer letter will reference law (for me, it was trademark law) or will reference a contract. I've gotten both kinds, and found that it was easier to educate myself regarding the threats made in reference to the contract than in reference to the law.

Once you do some searching you'll get a better idea of whether you need legal counsel. And just because you receive a letter doesn't mean you need to respond no matter what absurd timeline the demanding letter might have suggested.

Eventually they'll have to put up (and file a lawsuit) or shut up.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#27

Post by paultopia »

Palo Alto networks also makes bossware so intrusive that it's basically malware. Their VPN software on MacOS, for example, collects tons of system data and starts itself persistently on reboot + cannot be quit unless the user happens to have much-more-technical-than-most-users levels of knowledge about things like sudo and the various plist files work.

My own experience, in a couple Twitter threads:

https://mobile.twitter.com/PaulGowder/status/129693268470763...

https://mobile.twitter.com/PaulGowder/status/129686524552122...

Tl;dr: I installed their VPN software on my personal computer in order to get remote library database access during COVID. It turns out that it wanted to know everything about my system and I had to rip holes into configuration files 99% of users couldn't even find in order to stop it.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#28

Post by kobalsky »

codingdave wrote: post #3

Lawyers sending letters to discourage actions they do not like are fairly standard. I've had attorneys tell me that if you are not getting letters like this, you aren't making enough of an impact. And to be clear, this is just a letter - tossing one of these out just to see if it works is an easy tactic because many smaller organizations are terrified of litigation, and will cave to demands even if there is no legal…

> Do take the letters seriously... determine whether there are valid legal claims presented. But if there are not, it is a scare tactic, so don't stress over it.

Is the validity of the legal claim that relevant? If deep pockets co. wants to sue you into oblivion can't they just drag the trial forever and make sure you go bankrupt from legal fees before reaching a judgement?

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#29

Post by soumyadeb »

codingdave wrote: post #3

Lawyers sending letters to discourage actions they do not like are fairly standard. I've had attorneys tell me that if you are not getting letters like this, you aren't making enough of an impact. And to be clear, this is just a letter - tossing one of these out just to see if it works is an easy tactic because many smaller organizations are terrified of litigation, and will cave to demands even if there is no legal…

Most likely than not, they have legal basis for what they are asking for. Check with your lawyers and if they agree, you should just accept and move on. The distraction (and cost) of having to fight a legal battle to have a comparison page on your website is just not worth it for most startups.

We are a tiny company building an open-source alternative to an existing SaaS app and we have received two such letters in the last 6 months. First time I just replied in an email, second time I had the lawyers respond to create a legal trail. I don't think we were at fault in both the cases but it is still not worth it.

Re: Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

#30

Post by kmeisthax »

kobalsky wrote: post #28
codingdave wrote: post #3

Lawyers sending letters to discourage actions they do not like are fairly standard. I've had attorneys tell me that if you are not getting letters like this, you aren't making enough of an impact. And to be clear, this is just a letter - tossing one of these out just to see if it works is an easy tactic because many smaller organizations are terrified of litigation, and will cave to demands even if there is no legal…

> Do take the letters seriously... determine whether there are valid legal claims presented. But if there are not, it is a scare tactic, so don't stress over it. Is the validity of the legal claim that relevant? If deep pockets co. wants to sue you into oblivion can't they just drag the trial forever and make sure you go bankrupt from legal fees before reaching a judgement?

Depends on the jurisdiction and tort. America is notably hostile to attorney fee shifting, to the point where we literally call it the French Rule. If you're sued for something baseless you're expected to have the money to defend yourself. Copyright is unique in that fee shifting is regularly granted in the US, but even then it's limited to specific amounts of hours billed at a reasonable rate as determined by a court. You don't get to just hire the most expensive attorney with the expectation that they can make the nuisance suit go away and then collect from the plaintiff rather than the defendant.
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