The Honest Thief Revealed As A Prank
from the April-Fool's... dept
A few weeks ago when everyone was writing about "The Honest Thief", the new peer-to-peer offering from the Netherlands that flaunted the fact that you could use it to trade music - saying it was legal in the Netherlands - I didn't bother to post it. I wish I could say that it was because I realized it sounded too good to be true. Instead, the reasons were that (1) everyone else was talking about it and (2) I couldn't see how it was all that different than any file sharing program, other than having an amusing marketing strategy. Either way, it turns out that the folks who put it together fooled an awful lot of people, as "The Honest Thief" was simply a well-thought out April Fool's prank/publicity stunt for a book of the same name. Update: Not surprisingly, many of those who were fooled - including the PR agency that generated all the hype - are not at all happy about this news.
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