When trying to block information backfires
According to Techdirt, a group of people in Wisconsin are petitioning a local library for permission to burn “Baby Be-Bop“, the story of a gay teenager.
Of course, by making this big stink about wanting to burn the book (and suing for $120,000 because they were exposed to it), the book is gaining a lot of attention.
The louder they scream about this, the more attention (and sales) the book will see.
I’ll open with the line TechCrunch opened with, because it summarizes this situation perfectly:
The lawyers never seem to get the fact that some things just aren’t that interesting until they try to force people not to talk about them. And that’s certainly the case with London headquartered Barclays bank, which has fought the UK newspaper The Guardian all week over the publication of internal Barclays Bank documents alleged to detail huge tax avoidance schemes by the company that total more than $16 billion.
It’s really quite simple. Before the lawyers made a stink about this, the documents had been accessed by a grand total of 127 people. Now the WikiLeaks page has been overwhelmed with traffic, and thousands of people have seen the documents. Oops indeed.
I hate companies like this and I’m glad that the internet can show everyone how stupid and arrogant they are. Improv Everywhere is a group based in New York that does funny improv stunts around the city, such as sending a bunch of people into Best Buy in blue golf shirts, and a 200 person freeze in Grand Central station. It’s all pretty funny stuff that is fairly harmless.
Last year, they performed “Best Game Ever“, where they made a little league game awesome — showing up with signs, as peanut vendors, etc. Everyone enjoyed it. This year on April 1st they did the “Best Funeral Ever” as a joke. They staged a fake funeral, then pretended to crash it and join the mourners, but made the video look like they were crashing a real funeral. Here’s the video:
Lots of people fell for it (and many were quite upset), including CW 11 news (WPIX) who played it on the air as if it really happened. They didn’t contact Improv Everywhere. They didn’t call the cemetery. They didn’t try to get a quote from the family. Nothing. They played it as a factual story. Here’s their news story about it:
Improv Everywhere posted a video of the news story on their site, but it was later removed due a copyright claim from the Tribune, who owns the news station. Not only was this a horrible way to try to hide their mistake (rather than own up to it and apologize), but it simply reeks of hypocrisy. They showed the Improv Everywhere video on the air without permission or attribution, then file a DMCA claim to have their video removed from YouTube. As Charlie Todd, the founder of IE, said:
It’s OK for them to air content that we shot and own, but it’s not OK for me to upload their footage of the content they took from me? It’s “fair use” for the news to take a video off of YouTube and broadcast it, but it’s not “fair use” for a citizen to expose their poor reporting on his own content?
CW 11, nice job hiding the story. Now instead of a handful of people knowing how stupid you area, a whole bunch know.
It’s happened over and over. Something is printed in a newspaper that an individual doesn’t like, so they try to hide it by stealing and trashing as many of the newspapers as they can find. How’s that usually work out for them?
In this case, it was police officers at MIT. One of them was caught dealing drugs and a story about it was wirtten in “The Tech”, the MIT paper. Two other officers have now been suspended after they dumped about 300 copies of the paper in a recycling bin. Of course, this didn’t stop the story from being published on the the paper’s website, and now it’s getting a lot more attention.
Seems to be like these two ought to be fired — not for what they did necessarily, but for showing just how short-sighted they are. I certainly wouldn’t want people that dumb to be working for me.
A few days ago, users of Symantic’s Norton Internet Protection software starting getting warnings about a file named Pifts.exe that was trying to access the internet. While users struggled to figure out what this warning was about, Symantec kept very quiet.
In fact, they started deleting forum theads about Pifts on their support forum, leading to even more speculation about what this might be. This lead to widespread stories about the problem and Symantec’s coverup including CrunchGear (Digg), the Telegraph and many blogs and even ranked highly in Google Trends for a while.
They’re now saying that it was simply a diagnostic patch and the forum deletions were due to a spammer on their boards at the same time. As CrunchGear says, “Ver-r-r-y convenient”.
Mike at Freebase summed it up best:
Now, this could be a benign program. But Norton’s absolutely bizarre behavior has given this PIFTS file a life of its own.
16-year-old Kimberley Swann had recently been hired by Ivell Marketing & Logistics to do some office administration work — shred paper, scan documents, etc. She updated her Facebook status a number of times to reflect how boring the work was. Some of the updates included:
Considering the kind of work she describes, I can’t say I blame her for being bored. Her boss didn’t see it that way. After discovering the posts, he called Kimberley into his office, fired her, and told her:
I have seen your comments on Facebook and I don’t want my company being in the news.
Oops. He didn’t mention any problems with her performance, and she hadn’t been using the companies name in her updates. It’s also not clear whether she was posting from work or not, but it seems that she was. If it was a problem, he probably should have at least asked her not to play on Facebook during work, which would be fair.
As it turns out, this story is now on the Daily Mail, Fark, Fox News, the Telegraph and many other sites. So much for keeping his company out of the news.
Almost a year after they sued Google for including their home in StreetView, the U.S. District Court has dismissed the lawsuit that Aaron and Christine Boring had brought against Google.
As expected, this lawsuit has done two things:
More details can be found on Mashable.
A very classic case (via techdirt). Nemesysco developed a lie detector that apparently has some problems, which were documented by a report in a technology journal by some Swedish researchers. Rather than debunk their claims, Nemesysco decided to try to silence them with legal action. Oops.
According to the researchers:
It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence.
The fact that they jumped right into legal action rather than trying to set the facts straight tells me that the technology journal probably has the right story.
It’s shocking how many big companies still don’t have a clue about the Streisand Effect. The latest comes from De Beers.
A couple of weeks ago, a spoofed version of the New York Times was handed out in New York. They printed thousands of copies, headlined with “IRAQ WAR ENDS” and dated July 4, 2009. It was kind of funny, everyone had a laugh, and by now we’d forgotten all about it. Except for De Beers.
Buried in the online version of the paper is a fake De Beers ad. It wasn’t remarkably funny and didn’t get much attention. However, De Beers is now sending the legal dogs after it. Oddly, they’re going after the domain registrar for the site rather than the people that created the ad.
As TechDirt points out, the registrar is clearly protected from this type of action, and the ad is quite clearly a protected parody. The only thing that’s going to happen is that:
A — More people will see the ad that De Beers wants removed.
B — De Beers comes across looking like a cocky, out-of-touch company.
Nice move.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Maybe so.
The Boston Herald has written an article today talking about how bad this new online dating service is. It matches up married men and women for “an affair to remember”. I agree that the site is bad taste, but I think the Herald is a bit confused.
As part of their article, they:
