- "The whole story would be far more humorous were it not from a case in which Perrone represented a woman who claims that she nearly died after being incarcerated and not given proper medical care. Perrone must now refile his complaint in that case—without the cartoon dragon."
That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any capacity to oversee their work. Their access to legal services is presumably similar to their access to medical care. There's nothing amusing about this outcome. It's seriously depressing that "the coked-up cartoon-dragoon attorney" is the best representation that person, in their helpless situation, was able to navigate to.
To a normal person, sure. But the legal system ruins lives and deals in ruined lives every day. They don't blink twice at that stuff. A cartoon dragon on the other hand...
I remember reading a couple years back, when some judges in Louisiana were exposed systematically discarding legal petitions from incarcerated plaintiffs into trash cans, without reading them. Totally nulled out any access to courts, any possibility of justice, for thousands of people.
> That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
If the complaint is true, then yes it is offensive and the results will be more serious than being required to refile the complaint without the watermark. The process of determining if the complaint is true or not is the justice system.
Yes. Now probably a couple dozen people are going to collectively spend thousands of hours going over the complaint. The watermark issue is indeed just a sideshow by comparison.
The posts on this HN story demonstrate exactly the point the judge is trying to make. This sort of optics issue looms so large in human brains that it is indeed generating accusations that the court case is not being taken seriously because the court must obviously be spending all of its attention on this visually appealing story, even though in the grand scheme of things it is a tiny fraction of just the effort that will be spent on this case overall. Justice must not just be just, it must be seen to be just, and this sort of behavior is an impossibly attractive nuisance for people. Even those defending the picture are still being sucked into a sideshow.
The court does not deal in "truth." It deals in civil cases with "more likely than not" or in criminal cases "beyond a reasonable doubt."
It's also why the court prefers that people settle with each other outside of court processes. The court is a brutal cudgel. It has exceptional power to change outcomes but this use is almost never the ideal outcome for anyone involved.
The "outcome" is simply that the judge simply directed the attorney to stop using the dragon watermark. Whats the problem?
And, by the way, I'd recommend a bit less credulity about this kind of lawsuit. While there is no doubt that a lot of terrible things happen in America's prisons, it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement. It's understandable. Prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and being incarcerated sucks even if your rights are not actually being violated. Not saying which this is -- I have no way of knowing. I'm just pointing out that it's a mistake to take the allegations in a legal complaint at face value.
> it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement.
It seems pernicious to suggest distrust of claims. Like Blackstone's ratio[1], presuming good faith and investigating, then addressing abuses of the system, seems like the ideal process. The ideal likely ending up unsustainable due to staffing constraints.
[1] "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
If a prisoner in America says they are being deprived of adaquate medical care, it's safe (for people generally, not the legal system) to assume it's true until proven otherwise.
Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.
The corollary is also true: it's extremely common for courts to be prejudiced against inmate lawsuits. In extreme cases they don't even read their filings,
Why would they spend money on a frivolous case they have no chance of winning? Lawyers, dragon or no, are expensive, and people in prison don't exactly make money. Conversely, abuse of prisoners is endemic in America. I find this all extremely plausible.
>The "outcome" is simply that the judge simply directed the attorney to stop using the dragon watermark. Whats the problem?
I think the poster was trying to make the point that in a "just" society, the story would be about how this individual is in this position and only has the choice of this attorney, and not instead about the purple dragon.
Absolutely. Federal courts are filled with nonsense habeas petitions by pro se plaintiffs claiming this exact kind of stuff. The fact that this person managed to get representation adds some credibility, but then we’re also here discussing how ridiculous that particular representation has behaved.
His website, which also features the purple dragon and a bunch of busted links in the footer, says that the firm "integrates AI to lower the cost of legal services."
Heh, optics have been important since the dawn of man, and probably even before. Ziggurats are all about optics, and so are mating displays. A cynic might say "more important", but that's hard to ascertain.
The legal system, for millienia, has always been a hodgepodge of very peculiar and esoteric rules about both substance and optics.
That's why lawyers exist, by the way. Outside of small claims court, laymen aren't equipped to navigate it without stepping on every possible rake imaginable.
the victim did have a choice of lawyers, far beyond a "luxury." Don't know if you live in the US or not, but it's hard to avoid personal injury attorney advertising in virtually every forum. More specifically, there are 426 PI lawyers listed in the Superlawyers directory for the Detroit area, and they claim to only list the top 5% of practicing attorneys. The plaintiff here could easily dump this guy and get someone else, for free, especially this early in the lawsuit when the complaint has just been filed.
This isn't a PI case and she couldn't "easily" get someone else for free. Maybe you're thinking she could get an attorney to take the case on a contingency basis, but that's not "free."
The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place.
That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.
Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...
I used to sysadmin for a law firm that used watermarks for draft filings as they went through the internal workflow on the theory that nobody would be stupid enough to actually file something with a translucent toucan on it, so it would make accidentally filing a draft less likely.
> Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.
For example, the Northern District of California rules require a 12-point standard proportional-width font, with no more than 28 lines per page 8½ inch by 11 inch white paper with numbered lines. This is their way of requiring double-spacing and enforcing the page limits[1].
BUT - The rules don't say anything about requiring the paper to be portrait rather than landscape. 28 lines on a landscape page would allow for a lot more text.
Alas, I'm not daring enough to try it, as the intent of the rule is clear, and I'm sure no judge would take kindly to it.
Some courts have moved to word count limits, requiring a certification of word count at the end with a lawyer's signature.
Common paper size definitions would indicate that 8 1/2x11 is portrait, while 11x8 1/2 is landscape, so they could reasonably reject a landscape filing on that basis.
Both to prevent silly games and for similar reasons as the "no brown M&Ms" rider in Van Halen's venue contracts: if you read and followed the instructions in detail for small things like formatting, you read and followed the instructions for the things that actually matter as well.
Consistency mainly. Judges want to be able to easily understand what they're looking at and for it to look professional. Double-spacing gives room to write in changes or notes. Line numbers let you reference stuff easily.
Also, sometimes we (developers) like to use wacky data for testing purposes. For example, I like to put Batman as a dummy user, and my QA likes to upload cat pictures when testing uploads/images.
We do it so it's obvious it's test data, and also we're lazy to think of more "real" data.
Just say some users expect real(ish) data for testing. I had a client who was totally not happy when he saw Batman and Superman in the test data.
There was a bank that wasn’t happy with “Rich Bastard” being used as dummy data but not being replaced in the mail merge, resulting in a couple thousand of their wealthiest customers getting a mailing with the salutation “Dear Rich Bastard,”
I learned a long time ago to be very careful with mock, dummy, or test data.... because some people will just push anything to prod, take screenshots during your demo and paste it into the official documentation... you name it.
I was giving a demo on how to set up multiple computers in a federated setup using Active Directory, ADFS, etc... I had about 5 VMs named things like Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Boomhauer, Bill, and a test user HHill, 123 Rainy Street, Arlen, TX -- someone screenshotted and took notes during the demo and now that's in some formal training somewhere material. Thankfully, it's all internal.
When I and doing dev work and I need an available port, just any port, I use 666 -- because it's never used by anything and also DOOM. I gave a sprint demo and I used 660 instead of 666 to demo that the customer can specify the port number of screen X. Someone put that in the internal and also customer facing documentation... so now my company's product is default setup on 660, even thought it's completely user-configurable. Thank God I didn't demo with 666...
I can't remember the details, but I've heard a story multiple times about a fake-sounding name being used in testing -- I think US military payroll? -- and causing problems when a real person had that name. Can anyone here remember this?
In any case, "batman" is just about plausible enough that it could be real. I tend to use names like "Mr. Testy Testalicious" which (a) contain the string "test", and (b) are so wildly absurd that I'm confident nobody will ever collide with it.
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, famously had issues with IT systems:
Tim: There’re so many places we could start, but in the process of doing homework for this, I found mentioned, and I wanted to do a fact check on this, of you having plane tickets automatically cancelled, and other issues related to your last name. Is that accurate? Did those things actually happen?
Caterina Fake: This has happened to me many times, in fact. And I discovered that it was actually the systems at KLM and Northwest that would throw my ticket out, my last name being “Fake.” And I have missed flights and have spent way too many hours with customer service trying to fix this problem. Here’s another thing too, is that I was unable for the first two years of Facebook to make an account there also. And probably all of my relatives.
I used to use Testy Tester until one of my coworkers commented that she was acquainted with the Tester family, and there were quite a few of them in the area. These days I usually have completely separate systems for testing, but even there I use something like Zzzperson for test data.
I've seen too many stories of placeholder text ending up in production... so I better make it worthwhile and include some Lovecraft quotes [0] because everyone needs more gibbering, cyclopean, eldritch adjectives in their lives.
I give Abubis a special pass, because they sell a business oriented version without the character. The true cost of using FOSS is you don't have any say in what the developer does.
When designing, the standard practice is to use Lorem Ipsum - sort of mangled Latin that works like normal text but is very recognisable. This backfired once when I did a website for the Jesuits - the feedback they gave was that the design looks good but they were all baffled by the text and could I do something about it please.
I’d not considered that they might be the only client where everyone was fluent in Latin.
Reminds me of the Catholic friend who once told me that he had done IT support for every Catholic religious order with a presence in the city where he lived, except two.
The Carthusians didn't use computers, and the Jesuits didn't need his help.
I'm a big fan of using Emoji for names of test/dummy users. It helps test your application and dev stack's end-to-end Unicode compliance. It is less likely to conflict with real data (so far as I'm aware we haven't yet seen children born named with emoji, though that is likely a matter of time). It is often very visibly test data that stands out. But also and maybe more important, you can have fun with it.
We had a Dev environment that showed a doge meme on the auth page that had been there for like...7 years or something? "So auth. Much secure. Wow." etc.
Every other environment had standard boiler plate corporate logo + whatever product name. We kept the meme stuff in Dev just so you could be visually reminded, "Oh right, this is the crazy broken one."
Queue 7 years later, an emergency where we just had to impress a new client with a demo of how the product would work. And of course, the only thing that was really in a semi-ready state...was Dev. We couldn't move it over to a different one for some stupid reason or another.
Number one comment after the demo? "This looks very unprofessional. We do not want a dog logo on the login page. Is your team taking this seriously?"
We ran into the same thing back in the dot-com era. The development group had a sample customer set up as "Master Bait & Tackle", which had an outdoor outfitter theme. With items like fishing reels, lures, backpacks, etc. Entirely innocent (apart from the name).
Sales & Marketing got wind of how consistent the data was in it and wanted a copy they could use in presentations and for trade-show exhibits. We all said absolutely not. But they went around us and got a copy anyway.
It did not go well when a potential customer made a comment about the name during a demo.
Lesson learned. Always use the word "Test" in your test data. Always.
I used to put a diagonal light gray huge "DRAFT" across pages of certain documents for which it was important that a working draft not be interpreted as final.
What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only.
Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple cartoon dragon on every page.
Depending on the lawyer's personality, a big purple dragon might also double as lighthearted stress relief, when billing 12+ hours a day, of high-stakes work.
His business is called “Dragon Lawyers”, his phone number is JAKELAW, his main reason for using is because “people like dragons” and his firm’s goal is to “integrate AI to lower the cost of legal services”. I’m pretty sure this is not the guy pulling his hair off for 12+ hours a day to make sure he is doing it right.
Don't stop there: 80% of the links on his website don't work and he has fake reviews from "Johnathan Smith," "Michael Brown," "Emily Johnson," and "Sarah Davis."
I also think the dragon could be used for such drafts like you describe, although that should not substitute for writing DRAFT on the document, but instead the dragon would be in addition to writing DRAFT on the document (perhaps in the header and/or footer, since the dragon means not room for that in the middle of the document). Both the DRAFT label and the dragon (or other pictures in the watermarks) would only be used in drafts and both omitted for the final version.
> Is like my great grandpa scolding us at the dinner table for laughing and talking
It's more like a non-familial, formal dinner setting. Think about a job interview where the CEO and interviewer take you and another interviewee to dinner in a fancy restaurant. You turn up in jeans and sneakers with your buddy and you laugh and crack jokes together, the other interviewee turns up in smart clothes and talks soberly. In a few cases (and perhaps only seen in Holywood movies about the American Dream) the CEO may love the irreverence and impertinence and see it as a strength and sign of strong individuality, in almost all cases the bosses will not appreciate it and you will not get a job. Great grandpa loves you, the boss at your place of work doesn't.
I would say that job interview in the fancy restaurant is the first "unprofessional" step in this chain. The place to conduct serious interviews is called the office.
Courts deal with serious life-changing issues and everyone involved in a court case is expected behave seriously. In fact, that is literally the primary role of the judge. And why judges are famously strict on procedure, demeanor, and the overall decorum of the courtroom. This is the only thing that prevents your average court case from turning into an episode of Jerry Springer.
The court is not a homely dinner between citizens, it's the pinnacle of state power and a place where people are judged by it. Even if the court would always be just and fair it would still be a place of tragedy and suffering for many of the participants.
A judge has the power to (effectively or actually) end someone's life. I am very glad this responsibility is taken seriously. As an adult I'm sick of memes and childish "stickers" etc everywhere as it is. It certainly doesn't belong in a court.
The legal system relies on an sense of awe. Gavels, neo-classical buildings, wigs, elevated benches, latin and yes formality in documents are all just ways to build and maintain that awe.
It’s just as terrible as a lawyer submitting a document written in a totally inappropriate register, like street slang littered with vulgar phrases. There’s a time and a place for cartoon dragons. A court of law is neither. If you don’t understand why, maybe it’s time for you to learn a thing or two about human communication.
If this was a small claims court over a $100 garden fence post being broken, maybe. An annoying distraction, for sure, and unprofessional for someone who's supposed to take your case seriously, but little harm done.
This is about a woman whose entire life hangs in the balance. A higher standard of care and professionalism is expected.
Plus, depending on where you live, judges may decide to hand out punishments for whatever power-tripping reasons they see fit. There have been plenty of videos online of judges handing out sentences to (black) people for not responding in whatever the American version of the Queen's English is. It's an absolutely fucked up system, but when you're operating in such a system, an appropriate amount of fear and respect for the judge is necessary.
You can play games with the court in your own time, but don't risk your clients' lives because you feel compelled to add your stupid mascot to official documents.
The judge is right, but unfortunately there is no easy way to handle it. Right now, effectively, what he did was give JAKELAW the free advertisement that he wanted to get when he submitted the document in the first place. Hell even I have memorised his phone number. That was not a watermark, that is intentionally put there to annoy and distress the reader so it becomes news. He knows his audience and played all his cards right. Gaslit the judge, put the judge in a situation where he has to be the “bad” guy (even though he’s right), and has even earned some leverage to criticize the system as being frivolous.
And to be honest we can waste our time indefinitely trying to argue the meta here that “maybe Jake is not that bad”, and let him catch us on his gaslighting trap, but the truth is that yes, he is the asshole playing with people’s lives, not the judge.
There's a point in everyone's career where they think their work is under constant threat of being stolen, copied, repurposed or otherwise used in a manner that will "steal your livelihood" or some thing..
Eventually you realize that a) no one cares, your work isn't _that_ unique and valuable and b) if someone wants to use your stuff, they will find a way..
The idea of a giant watermark behind text that can just be scanned and OCR'ed anyways is this kind of silly.
I don't think that's true for the generation of people who grew up with the internet. "Information ought to be free" was ingrained into their systems. You either put something on the internet and expect that people will want it for free, or you don't put it on the internet and it's private.
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That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any capacity to oversee their work. Their access to legal services is presumably similar to their access to medical care. There's nothing amusing about this outcome. It's seriously depressing that "the coked-up cartoon-dragoon attorney" is the best representation that person, in their helpless situation, was able to navigate to.
https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-judges-ignored-... ("Louisiana Judges Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions Without Review" (2023))
It's the type of story that sensitizes you to awareness of the pattern.
That the victim in the OP story got access to an attorney of any color—even dragon-purple—actually puts them above the median.
If the complaint is true, then yes it is offensive and the results will be more serious than being required to refile the complaint without the watermark. The process of determining if the complaint is true or not is the justice system.
The posts on this HN story demonstrate exactly the point the judge is trying to make. This sort of optics issue looms so large in human brains that it is indeed generating accusations that the court case is not being taken seriously because the court must obviously be spending all of its attention on this visually appealing story, even though in the grand scheme of things it is a tiny fraction of just the effort that will be spent on this case overall. Justice must not just be just, it must be seen to be just, and this sort of behavior is an impossibly attractive nuisance for people. Even those defending the picture are still being sucked into a sideshow.
It's also why the court prefers that people settle with each other outside of court processes. The court is a brutal cudgel. It has exceptional power to change outcomes but this use is almost never the ideal outcome for anyone involved.
And, by the way, I'd recommend a bit less credulity about this kind of lawsuit. While there is no doubt that a lot of terrible things happen in America's prisons, it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement. It's understandable. Prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and being incarcerated sucks even if your rights are not actually being violated. Not saying which this is -- I have no way of knowing. I'm just pointing out that it's a mistake to take the allegations in a legal complaint at face value.
It seems pernicious to suggest distrust of claims. Like Blackstone's ratio[1], presuming good faith and investigating, then addressing abuses of the system, seems like the ideal process. The ideal likely ending up unsustainable due to staffing constraints.
[1] "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.
https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-judges-ignored-... ("Louisiana Judges Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions Without Review" (2023))
I think the poster was trying to make the point that in a "just" society, the story would be about how this individual is in this position and only has the choice of this attorney, and not instead about the purple dragon.
His website, which also features the purple dragon and a bunch of busted links in the footer, says that the firm "integrates AI to lower the cost of legal services."
Hopefully this lawyer is making sure this AI isn't making up the cases it's citing, which is a continuing problem: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ai+make+up+legal+cases
That's why lawyers exist, by the way. Outside of small claims court, laymen aren't equipped to navigate it without stepping on every possible rake imaginable.
Has anyone at any point expressed otherwise? You're tilting at windmills.
The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place.
That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.
Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...
For example, the Northern District of California rules require a 12-point standard proportional-width font, with no more than 28 lines per page 8½ inch by 11 inch white paper with numbered lines. This is their way of requiring double-spacing and enforcing the page limits[1].
BUT - The rules don't say anything about requiring the paper to be portrait rather than landscape. 28 lines on a landscape page would allow for a lot more text.
Alas, I'm not daring enough to try it, as the intent of the rule is clear, and I'm sure no judge would take kindly to it.
Some courts have moved to word count limits, requiring a certification of word count at the end with a lawyer's signature.
[1]: https://cand.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/CAND_Civil_Loca... (Civ. L.R. 3-4(c)).
Yeah I suspect a lot of their cases going forward will be on contingency.
This comment had me spitting my coffee. How do they even come up with this.
We do it so it's obvious it's test data, and also we're lazy to think of more "real" data.
Just say some users expect real(ish) data for testing. I had a client who was totally not happy when he saw Batman and Superman in the test data.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dear-rich-bastard/
I was giving a demo on how to set up multiple computers in a federated setup using Active Directory, ADFS, etc... I had about 5 VMs named things like Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Boomhauer, Bill, and a test user HHill, 123 Rainy Street, Arlen, TX -- someone screenshotted and took notes during the demo and now that's in some formal training somewhere material. Thankfully, it's all internal.
When I and doing dev work and I need an available port, just any port, I use 666 -- because it's never used by anything and also DOOM. I gave a sprint demo and I used 660 instead of 666 to demo that the customer can specify the port number of screen X. Someone put that in the internal and also customer facing documentation... so now my company's product is default setup on 660, even thought it's completely user-configurable. Thank God I didn't demo with 666...
I can't remember the details, but I've heard a story multiple times about a fake-sounding name being used in testing -- I think US military payroll? -- and causing problems when a real person had that name. Can anyone here remember this?
In any case, "batman" is just about plausible enough that it could be real. I tend to use names like "Mr. Testy Testalicious" which (a) contain the string "test", and (b) are so wildly absurd that I'm confident nobody will ever collide with it.
It lists a few people, like "Daniel Batman (20 March 1981 – 26 June 2012) was an Australian sprinter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batman
A few DDG searches finds others with the surname Batman who are not famous enough to be on Wikipedia.
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/adele-dazeem-idina-menz...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Tester
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Ralf Kramden 1060 W. Addision Chicago IL 60613 United States
[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft
I’d not considered that they might be the only client where everyone was fluent in Latin.
The Carthusians didn't use computers, and the Jesuits didn't need his help.
He is, himself, a weird character.
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Every other environment had standard boiler plate corporate logo + whatever product name. We kept the meme stuff in Dev just so you could be visually reminded, "Oh right, this is the crazy broken one."
Queue 7 years later, an emergency where we just had to impress a new client with a demo of how the product would work. And of course, the only thing that was really in a semi-ready state...was Dev. We couldn't move it over to a different one for some stupid reason or another.
Number one comment after the demo? "This looks very unprofessional. We do not want a dog logo on the login page. Is your team taking this seriously?"
Sales & Marketing got wind of how consistent the data was in it and wanted a copy they could use in presentations and for trade-show exhibits. We all said absolutely not. But they went around us and got a copy anyway.
It did not go well when a potential customer made a comment about the name during a demo.
Lesson learned. Always use the word "Test" in your test data. Always.
What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only.
Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple cartoon dragon on every page.
Depending on the lawyer's personality, a big purple dragon might also double as lighthearted stress relief, when billing 12+ hours a day, of high-stakes work.
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However, I have never understood notions like this: “it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon”
Is like my great grandpa scolding us at the dinner table for laughing and talking.
It's more like a non-familial, formal dinner setting. Think about a job interview where the CEO and interviewer take you and another interviewee to dinner in a fancy restaurant. You turn up in jeans and sneakers with your buddy and you laugh and crack jokes together, the other interviewee turns up in smart clothes and talks soberly. In a few cases (and perhaps only seen in Holywood movies about the American Dream) the CEO may love the irreverence and impertinence and see it as a strength and sign of strong individuality, in almost all cases the bosses will not appreciate it and you will not get a job. Great grandpa loves you, the boss at your place of work doesn't.
I’ve found it helpful to use lawyers who know the courts and people of the courts where my case is going to take place.
This is about a woman whose entire life hangs in the balance. A higher standard of care and professionalism is expected.
Plus, depending on where you live, judges may decide to hand out punishments for whatever power-tripping reasons they see fit. There have been plenty of videos online of judges handing out sentences to (black) people for not responding in whatever the American version of the Queen's English is. It's an absolutely fucked up system, but when you're operating in such a system, an appropriate amount of fear and respect for the judge is necessary.
You can play games with the court in your own time, but don't risk your clients' lives because you feel compelled to add your stupid mascot to official documents.
And to be honest we can waste our time indefinitely trying to argue the meta here that “maybe Jake is not that bad”, and let him catch us on his gaslighting trap, but the truth is that yes, he is the asshole playing with people’s lives, not the judge.
Eventually you realize that a) no one cares, your work isn't _that_ unique and valuable and b) if someone wants to use your stuff, they will find a way..
The idea of a giant watermark behind text that can just be scanned and OCR'ed anyways is this kind of silly.
Formal answers to goofiness (voluntary or not) will always amuse me.