Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Ziff Davis' Lawyers Threaten Pocket PC Tools
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 12:30 AM
"We are currently being threatened with legal action by a large organization that produces news stories (I am trying to find out if I am "allowed" to post the emails they have sent me). A while back (about a month and 70 posts ago), one of our admins posted a story that introduced you to one of their stories. Needless to say, there was a small editorial about the said story, a short quote from the story, a link to, and full credit given to them for the story. Well, yesterday we got an email from their "Rights & Permissions Manager" (do companies actually have full time people harassing Fan sites such as ours?!?). In the email they stated that "It has come to our attention that pocketpctools.com is using our eWeek copyrighted material on its website..."."
Barry talked to me about this last week, and things have evolved quite a bit since it was posted on Slashdot. As I expected, Ziff Davis immediately back-peddled and offered up a statement from Matthew Rothenberg Executive, editor at Ziff Davis (read the full thing on the /. thread)
"While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!"
It's nice to see them backing off, but based on my conversations with Barry and the comments posted by Rothenberg in the forums, something doesn't add up. First, they stopped responding to Barry's inquiries after he pulled his post. If they really cared about learning more as Rothenberg claims, they would have continued the dialogue. Secondly, Rothenberg claims it was an "overzealous legal intern" that sent the email, but unless they started making interns "Rights & Permissions Managers", this doesn't quite add up.
Are mainstream media sites really so clueless that they don't understand the value that sites like ours bring to the table? It seems so. Man, this has been a bad week for big companies understanding enthusiasts like us. Maybe I should have been a marine biologist after all. :lol:
Barry talked to me about this last week, and things have evolved quite a bit since it was posted on Slashdot. As I expected, Ziff Davis immediately back-peddled and offered up a statement from Matthew Rothenberg Executive, editor at Ziff Davis (read the full thing on the /. thread)
"While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!"
It's nice to see them backing off, but based on my conversations with Barry and the comments posted by Rothenberg in the forums, something doesn't add up. First, they stopped responding to Barry's inquiries after he pulled his post. If they really cared about learning more as Rothenberg claims, they would have continued the dialogue. Secondly, Rothenberg claims it was an "overzealous legal intern" that sent the email, but unless they started making interns "Rights & Permissions Managers", this doesn't quite add up.
Are mainstream media sites really so clueless that they don't understand the value that sites like ours bring to the table? It seems so. Man, this has been a bad week for big companies understanding enthusiasts like us. Maybe I should have been a marine biologist after all. :lol:
