Cowardice, ISP-style
Last week, Christopher Bird (mightygodking) wrote a savage play-by-play review of the latest Harry Potter book. He (a) wrote it before the Friday midnight embargo was lifted, and (b) [and this is the important qualifier] didn't have a legal department that could block a SLAPP, so the book publisher immediately whipped out a DMCA takedown and slapped it down on the service desk of SixApart (livejournal's new, and very corporate, owner.)
Reviews don't traditionally count as a copyright violation, but SixApart has a reputation of buckling under to threats, so they relayed the threat on to mightygodking. Who pulled the review before the DMCA deadline.
However, Friday came and went, so the embargo went away and hoi polloi (including mightygodking) were allowed to purchase and read the latest Harry Potter book. So he "officially" read the latest Harry Potter book, then published a savage review of it.
The book was published, reviews (including spoilers with much more detail that the mightygodking review) were written and published, and you'd think that would be it. Right?
Well, apparently not. I read mighygodking.livejournal.com pretty regularly, so late last night (after a longish livejournal outage) I fired up a web browser and went over to see if there was anything new there. There was, but it was not the sort of "new" I was looking forward to:
Now that's customer service for you. Bad customer service (unless you're a thin-skinned publisher who thinks that if they strike every bad review from the net everyone will love it,) but customer service nevertheless.
I was thinking of putting a TSFR mirror into livejournal so I could keep up with the snigglers I used to know before I met the best and we scampered off to the west coast, but eesh, that's not exactly the sort of friendly environment I'd want to be around.
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you could put up a linking-only mirror and say, with every post,
“my latest post is <a href="rubberbunnies.com”>here I’d post it here too, but I can’t be bothered. Sniff, sniff."
I imagine they’d tolerate that in perpetuity, unless you said that you suspected it mike Ms. Rowling a shilling or two poorer.
I rrreally like my neww keyboarrd.