More on Baker & McKenzie vs. Boing Boing

Dave Taylor has a very interesting post on the subject of the Boing Boing vs. Baker & McKenzie situation that I posted about yesterday.

In summary, Dave’s position on this is that Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder’s response to B&M’s attempts to protect their client’s copyright was immature and misguided. I guess I do agree with him in principle. It was rather immature and snarky of Frauenfelder to write, “Baker & McKenzie, be on alert: henceforth, Boing Boing will be actively monitoring your website to identify dumbass activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to point out instances of wasting clients’ money by sending out unnecessary and obnoxious warning letters.”

Nevertheless, I still think that B&M made a mistake here by failing to understand the culture of the blogosphere. I know they’re not a marketing firm, but if you’re going to represent your client’s best interests out here, you have to take their reputation - and yours - into account when interacting with the blogosphere.

We all know that bloggers get extremely miffed when PR firms send them a generic press release, particularly when that release makes it obvious that the firm and their clients have never even read the blog in question. It’s fair to say that the same goes for legal warning letters of this sort. And given the snark factor in the blogosphere in general, I’d say Boing Boing’s response was pretty predictable.

I do take Taylor’s point that businesses need to protect their investments by enforcing their copyrights - but with the growth of the Web, we’re going to need to start rethinking those copyright laws. Obviously there is no perfect immediate solution, but maybe we need to start figuring out new ways to make money from content. Lots of broadcasting companies place products and marketing messages so seamlessly within their telecasts that advertisers get their plug in even when the content is downloaded and viewed illegally. Maybe when companies sell advertising on those telecasts, they should embed their estimates of the number of illegal downloaders into the amount that advertisers should pay for their sponsorships and product placements.

But apart from the copyright violation issue, I think what we have here is a failure on the part of B&M to make an accurate judgment of how their letter would be received by the blogosphere AND a failure on the part of Boing Boing to respond with maturity. On the whole, I’d still say that B&M’s screwup was the bigger one.