Our efforts from last week to quietly provide assistance to a blogger facing a legal threat have failed. Not because we did not help the blogger but because the story has now exploded into the media - old and new - and there is a tremendous amount of misinformation floating around. I cannot possibly hope to correct that misinformation but I would like to respond to a particularly uninformed and nasty post which was sent to me this morning by a member of the MBA.
Some kid named Ryan Tate has a snarky little post about our efforts to help a blogger facing a legal threat over at Gawker. He claims to have tried to find out about the MBA by reading our site and searching the web. Here's a thought, kid. Pick up the phone and call us - our phone number and email is on the same site you claimed to have read.
Had he called he would have realized that the statement below describing the MBA is as uninformed as it is idiotic:
"a self-appointed representative of a hugely diverse group, and its legitimacy appears entirely self-assigned"
Hilarious! Why let actual knowledge of the MBA get in the way of a chance to sneer and snark at four years of efforts to protect the free speech rights of bloggers in hundreds of cases. It's much more fun to disparage something you don't understand and don't care to understand.
Here's a note to Mr. Tate:
Dear Ryan,
Had you bothered to call you would have learned that bloggers regularly contact the MBA seeking legal assistance in cases like this and we do our best to help them. In this particular case, Rogers Cadenhead came to us last week seeking legal assistance. We reached out to our own lawyer, Ron Coleman as well as the folks at the Harvard Law School's Citizen Media Defense Project and the EFF. We now have several other free speech groups involved and have solicited input from a wide variety of bloggers and free speech advocates. Last week, we were able to get AP to agree not to pursue any additional legal action against Rogers. I can appreciate that this might mean nothing to someone like you who works for a company that has legal and financial resources to protect you in the event of a legal threat for something you wrote but it is, I can assure, quite important to people like Rogers who would otherwise stand alone in defending themselves.
While that was welcome, there was still the matter of the 7 outstanding items in the most recent Take Down Notice. I pointed out to AP that the crux of the problem is that AP has never articulated what exactly it wants from bloggers. AP agrees that bloggers are a vital part of the new media landscape and they recognize the right of bloggers to link and excerpt. At the same time they engage in legal threats against people like Rogers which seem, in our view, to be unwarranted. I then proposed that we meet to discuss the 7 outstanding items to see if we can resolve those issues without the need for us to file counter-claims in federal court (something we are fully prepared to do if Rogers wishes it). AP agreed to that and a meeting was set up with our lawyers and their lawyers. Got all that?
Now, once they had agreed to meet to see if we could resolve Rogers situation, we offered to provide any assistance we could in helping them draft some sort of guidelines that could be promulgated to the blogosphere so that bloggers would have a clear understanding of AP's point of view on copyright, excerpting and linking. They were receptive to that offer and so when we meet this week to get Rogers case resolved (hopefully) we will stick around and try to kick around ideas on what a set of guidelines would look like.
Your notion that the MBA has appointed itself guardian of the blogosphere or that I am like Nixon going to the Paris Peace Talk to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War is not only erroneous but absurd on its face.
Last week this was not a major story and certainly not something you have bothered to write about on Gawker. We've been involved in hundreds of cases, done exactly the sort of thing we are doing here. That you don't know that is hardly our fault. Regardless, had you picked up a phone and called you could have known all of this because I would have been happy to share all of this with you.
So let me be clear. The MBA is not a "self-appointed" group seeking to "represent" the blogosphere. We were approached by a specific blogger to help him resolve a legal threat without needing to go to court. We are attempting to do what we've been doing for years - help a blogger who sought out help. I am sure this is not nearly as exciting as covering the latest sex scandal in Washington so that a Gawker blogger would be unaware of our efforts is hardly a surprise. What is a surprise is the sheer laziness required to write a post claiming to have "researched" the MBA when you did not both to call or send an email seeking information about the MBA. You have a bright future in the world of journalism.
