On “cease-and-desist” letters.
There’s a post on BoingBong about Scott Beale from LaughingSquid (cool guy and cool site), getting a cease-and-desist letter from the lawyers at Best Buy for merely blogging about someone making parody Best Buy shirts. After BoingBoing blogged about it, Best Buy sent a apology to Scott. Boing Boing blogged that, and linked the letter.
(Read the above paragraph out loud, and you really get a good feel for the “he said/she said” nature of the blogosphere. And we’re not done here today…Not by a long shot….):
So….the comments on BoingBoing contain some of the usual to-be-expected “This is an outrage! Best Buy is worse than Hitler!!!” reactions….mostly people complaining that that the lawyer-penned apology didn’t have Best Buy on its knees groveling and licking Scott’s butthole. Best Buy simply sent a typical lawyer apology.
I replied:
Looks fine to me.
Corporations carefully watch for making any “admissions of guilt” in writing, and I’d say this is the best anyone could hope to get for something like this.
Again, there was more whining from the peanut gallery, including a rather sane comment of someone saying
Ah. OK. I’m just always interested in alternatives to the megacorps, and electronics is one area where they (alternatives, that is) seem to be few and far between.
I posted this response, a reply to all the posters:
A lot of people these days say that they’re “interested in alternatives to the megacorps”, and it’s a decent proposal.
But really, no matter where you buy it, the stuff you’re buying is made by megacorps. You can order your flat-screen TV or iPhone or Vista Laptop or any device with a microprocessor from a mom-and-pop store online, but they’re getting it from the manufacture, who is always a megacorp….a megacorp that most likely utilizes near-slave labor in China to put the stuff together.
I like to “shop locally” and “support the little guy”, but a lot of these conversations devolve quickly into “more indie than thou”. Even if you’re running Linux, you’re running it on a chip made by a megacorp. It is impossible to make a chip as fast as a Duo-core in your basement.
I go where the price is best, where the selection is good, and where they let me walk around and poke stuff for hours without bugging me. I’m not going to stop shopping somewhere because they sent someone a lawyer letter (even if that someone, Scott Beale, is someone I know and consider a very decent guy.)
Megacorps send lawyer letters. It’s what they do. When someone owns intellectual property in the old-world model, if they don’t over-police their property, they’re underpolicing it, which is problematic when someone commits a truly huge infraction, like widescale actual bootlegging. It looks bad in court if they haven’t been “defending their claim.”
It is fine and good to blog about it when it’s out of line, like with this instance, but it’s not going to keep me out of the store.
That said, I don’t shop much at Best Buy, because they don’t sell stuff I do buy. (They do, incidentally, carry media that I created.)
Michael W. Dean
http://www.stinkfight.com
December 13th, 2007 at 3:04 am
So It seems they don’t want the free “subliminal product placement” (*;
December 13th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
By the way, someone pointed out to me…I make it sound here like Boing Boing alone got Best Buy to recant.
In actuality, it was a combination of things: Scott Beale posting on Laughing Squid. And it getting reposted on Boing Boing, Consumerist,
Digg, Slashdot and a lot of personal blogs. But was probably mostly because of Scott directly contacting Best Buy HQ.
MWD