The Times: Tech column - Penguin vs Katie.com
By David Rowan
CORPORATE TYPES still don't get it: if you make heavy-handed legal threats against popular web properties, you will damage only your own reputation.
Twice this week lawyers have been made to look foolish across the vast, instant judgment pool that is the popular chatroom. In both cases, the protagonist is now famous for all the wrong reasons.
Stephen Galton, a Los Angeles attorney, objected to some anonymous postings about him on a Yahoo message board, following his own appearance on the board to defend a client. So last week he launched a possible class-action lawsuit against the company for allowing chatroom identities to remain secret. Unfortunately for Galton, this has only amplified the level of personal abuse targeted at him, including around 700 mostly foul-mouthed attacks at Yahoo alone. There is also a campaign to make Google searches for "shyster" link to his website. Not a tremendous result.
Separately, the publisher Penguin was forced on Friday to announce that it was renaming its bestselling 2001 paperback, Katie.com, after an embarrassing public spat with the longstanding, unrelated website of that name. The site's British owner, Katie Jones, recently received what she called "very unpleasant" letters from a US lawyer working with the book's author, Katie Tarbox, demanding that she hand over the domain. Only when the popular Slashdot bulletin board dismissed the demands with contempt last week did Penguin belatedly admit defeat. But by then both Penguin and Tarbox's lawyer had damaged their standing among thousands who had read the posts.
* The Rapiscan Secure 1000 is the latest in full-body security scanners, designed to detect anything from guns to explosives hidden beneath a potential troublemaker's clothing. It uses "backscatter" X-rays to generate detailed images of whatever the person might be concealing, and has shown such promise in US airport trials that the Metropolitan Police wants to bring them to British schools. Sir John Stevens, the Met Commissioner, intends to offer the force's £100,000 machines to any heads who identify "a problem with knives". But does he realise that, by using them, they may inadvertently be breaking the Sexual Offences Act? So powerful is the Secure 1000 that it can display everything - absolutely everything -that the person being scanned has covered with clothes.
That, according to children's-rights campaigners, means that schools using these scanners will be creating "indecent images" of children. "We have seen examples of scans so intrusive that they clearly reveal genitalia," says Ian Dowty of Action on Rights for Children, who is threatening legal action under child pornography laws if Sir John goes ahead. Now that should make an interesting court case.
* Weblogs? So last year. The latest trend among technophiles is to communicate through video logs -online journals replete with film clips shot on digital video cameras. The comedian Adam Sandler has one, but mostly this is an amateur medium, used by "citizen journalists" to report from last week's Democratic National Convention, or as a way for budding film-makers to build an early fan base. "Video logging" may well explode when the mobile-phone networks offer it (as Orange intends to), but in the meantime you can meet the pioneers via websites such as demandmedia.net and vidblogs.com.
(The Times, August 10 2004)
CORPORATE TYPES still don't get it: if you make heavy-handed legal threats against popular web properties, you will damage only your own reputation.
Twice this week lawyers have been made to look foolish across the vast, instant judgment pool that is the popular chatroom. In both cases, the protagonist is now famous for all the wrong reasons.
Stephen Galton, a Los Angeles attorney, objected to some anonymous postings about him on a Yahoo message board, following his own appearance on the board to defend a client. So last week he launched a possible class-action lawsuit against the company for allowing chatroom identities to remain secret. Unfortunately for Galton, this has only amplified the level of personal abuse targeted at him, including around 700 mostly foul-mouthed attacks at Yahoo alone. There is also a campaign to make Google searches for "shyster" link to his website. Not a tremendous result.
Separately, the publisher Penguin was forced on Friday to announce that it was renaming its bestselling 2001 paperback, Katie.com, after an embarrassing public spat with the longstanding, unrelated website of that name. The site's British owner, Katie Jones, recently received what she called "very unpleasant" letters from a US lawyer working with the book's author, Katie Tarbox, demanding that she hand over the domain. Only when the popular Slashdot bulletin board dismissed the demands with contempt last week did Penguin belatedly admit defeat. But by then both Penguin and Tarbox's lawyer had damaged their standing among thousands who had read the posts.
* The Rapiscan Secure 1000 is the latest in full-body security scanners, designed to detect anything from guns to explosives hidden beneath a potential troublemaker's clothing. It uses "backscatter" X-rays to generate detailed images of whatever the person might be concealing, and has shown such promise in US airport trials that the Metropolitan Police wants to bring them to British schools. Sir John Stevens, the Met Commissioner, intends to offer the force's £100,000 machines to any heads who identify "a problem with knives". But does he realise that, by using them, they may inadvertently be breaking the Sexual Offences Act? So powerful is the Secure 1000 that it can display everything - absolutely everything -that the person being scanned has covered with clothes.
That, according to children's-rights campaigners, means that schools using these scanners will be creating "indecent images" of children. "We have seen examples of scans so intrusive that they clearly reveal genitalia," says Ian Dowty of Action on Rights for Children, who is threatening legal action under child pornography laws if Sir John goes ahead. Now that should make an interesting court case.
* Weblogs? So last year. The latest trend among technophiles is to communicate through video logs -online journals replete with film clips shot on digital video cameras. The comedian Adam Sandler has one, but mostly this is an amateur medium, used by "citizen journalists" to report from last week's Democratic National Convention, or as a way for budding film-makers to build an early fan base. "Video logging" may well explode when the mobile-phone networks offer it (as Orange intends to), but in the meantime you can meet the pioneers via websites such as demandmedia.net and vidblogs.com.
(The Times, August 10 2004)
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