Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

I have a hunch as to why this table isn't anything like the periodic table of elements.

For those that don't know, a long time ago Josh Duck built an HTML Periodic Table that actually resembled the periodic table. It got taken down, because someone else made another HTML Periodic Table (with clearly different organization and a very different look), and then she claimed that Josh Duck's very different periodic table was infringing on her copyright. She even went as far as to claim that he somehow even intercepted her emails to steal her ideas, and even alleged that Josh Duck and another guy who made a similar HTML Periodic Table were in kahoots because they were in the same country (Source: https://i.imgur.com/sthuEd8.png)! Pictures of the periodic table and a detailed story here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150417/08423730696/desig...

By making this table look nothing like the periodic table of elements (or like the ones that people were sued over), I think the creator should be able to avoid being sued by anyone trying to make a quick buck.

It's amazing that people remember this! Alara actually filed a suit against me, and that's when I learned the difference between being right, and being right in the eyes of the law. It involves lots of money being thrown at lawyers.

On the plus side, I later got to meet Mike (the other Australian who she thought I was in cahoots with) and later rebuilt the table into https://allthetags.com/, which is a lot more colourful but a lot less punny (shake your phone to learn something new).

> that's when I learned the difference between being right, and being right in the eyes of the law

It sounds like there's an interesting story here. Care to elaborate more?

Alara was absolutely sure that I'd somehow colluded with her publisher to steal and republish an illustration from her as-yet unpublished book.

I obviously knew that I hadn't. But once she'd started the legal ball rolling I had to engage a lawyer and respond through the appropriate legal channels. My lawyer told me litigation (going to court) will generally cost tens of thousands of dollars. And in California recovering costs is far from guaranteed, you have to file a counter-suit I think, and prove the original case was frivolous.

Filing a case is not free - she'd already spent at least a few hundred dollars in court costs and possibly much more for lawyers to draft cease and resists and the actual case. Either it was all a bluff, or she truly believed I stole from her. The second option was scarier. When you're faced with someone who is absolutely sure that you're a bad person, and has invested a lot of time and money into chasing you, how do you convince them they're wrong?

Imagine being in Twitter fight with someone who you think is completely off the rails. And now imagine you aren't allowed to just ignore them or block them but are forced to assemble a body of proof and pay a lawyer to convince an independent third party of the truth.

Given this was a webpage that was not making any money (I had tried to sell posters, but never ended up seeing a cent) the cost and time were not worth it.

Mike Riethmuller was the other guy she accused of theft. He managed to find a journalist to cover the issue, and that worked out much better for him! Not living in California also made him harder for her to chase down.

I guess this here is Mike's version. The best of the crop IMO

https://www.madebymike.com.au/demos/html5-periodic-table/

My goodness, that story is truly incredible.

This Alara Mills is an utterly reprehensible character, and her comments are astounding.

> I find it very suspicious that Josh Duck and Mike Riethmuller are both from Australia but claiming not to know each-other

…WHAT?! Australia is a country of 25 MILLION people! We don't all know each other!

She seems to have disappeared from the Internet, or now identifies as a jazz vocalist of some sort. If it's the same person, she seems(?) to have photoshopped her face onto the body of another woman[0]. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if I'm not, is that also possibly illegal?

[0]: https://www.alara5star.com/

Oh my god it keeps getting better[1]

> The artist is inspired by the likes of Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, and Anita Baker, to name but a few. AlarA’s vocal skills and enthusiasm for music easily puts her on par with these powerhouse vocalists.

She compares herself to Whitney Houston!

[1]: https://www.alara5star.com/about/

The problem is that this one isn't periodic. That word describes how things in columns (eg with the same mathematical period) have the same properties. Without that feature it's just a table.

Agreed, but there seems to be a reasonable explanation, so I'm not about to start complaining.

Plus it's described on the website as a periodical table, so I'm not even convinced the author is claiming it to be a periodic table.

I think this website violates my patent, "A process to display tabular data to users, but on a computer".

See the follow-on story at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150423/08252130770/desig... .

Wow. What a plot twists. I was expecting something like "The periodic table has inner logic and structure based on profound lows of our universe, while html is a random pile of crap made by fools like us". Instead, I got a much more interesting explanation.

I never could have imagined there was so much more to this story. Thank you for the article!

This story has a very deep rabbit hole... wondering if anyone else can confirm this -- I followed the links and it appears that the claimant just released an album? https://www.amazon.com/Love-Manifesto-ALara/dp/B07NDCHMQ9

Reply on news.ycombinator.com