Yet Another Example Of What Happens When Lawyers And Marketers Disagree

from the there-they-go-again dept

Mon, Jun 25th 2007 10:03pm — Mike Masnick

Just last week we wrote about reasons why lawyers shouldn't be making business decisions, which generated a bit of controversy. However, the examples keep on coming. With the ongoing practice of various entertainment companies sending takedown notices to YouTube over parodies and mashups, apparently some marketers are realizing that having lawyers send out takedown notices may not actually be in the best interest of the company's marketing strategy. 20th Century Fox's lawyers sent a takedown notice for a music video praising the popular Die Hard movie series, since the video was mostly made up of clips from the first three movies. However, now that the fourth movie in the series is coming out, suddenly marketing execs at Fox are paying the band to put the video back online. Of course, when you see stories like this, it makes you wonder how the entertainment industry can get away with claiming that other such videos cause "irreparable harm."

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

9 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2007 @ 12:05am

Man. I wish i had a differnt pet peeve. This whole 'hating hipocracy' thing is making it very hard to check out ANY news anymore.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2007 @ 4:24am
  
  Re:
  hypocrisy
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Me, 26 Jun 2007 @ 4:34am

Hypocrisy. Man I wish I owned the patent on that one!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Synonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2007 @ 5:38am

I, too, hate the elite hippopotamus ruling class and yearn for a return to the days of the hungry, hungry hippos.

To arms, comrades!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Rational Beaver, 26 Jun 2007 @ 10:12am

We've all been had! They obviously set this up to take advantage of the Streissand effect...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
SFC, 26 Jun 2007 @ 10:17am

Get your facts straight
Before writing sucessive articles on the subject of lawyers making business decisions, perhaps the author should consider if the there is any indication that the decisions was taken (or even advised) by a lawyer. The fact that a letter is signed by a lawyer does not even mean that said lawyer thought the letter was a good business decision.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
everydayjoe, 26 Jun 2007 @ 12:50pm

Re: Get your facts straight
There's some fine logic for you. That's two bad business decisions, and a complete lack of personal responsibility.

...lawyers, - I'll say it again:

"Lawyers are like HIV; you're only "happy" with them when the eventualities could be worse."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
yer' ol pirate, 26 Jun 2007 @ 12:52pm

Avast Mater, yer'all sho' them land-lovers what we w'nt! Tall'ho
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anon2, 26 Jun 2007 @ 2:53pm

Yes, you get it exactly right -- lawyers should not be making business decisions for their clients. But if a client makes a foolish business decision, but one that has merit from a technical legal standpoint, it's not the lawyer's job to refuse to do it. The lawyer may well question the client's wisdom, and may well even tell the client that, but at the end of the day the lawyer works for the client. So in this case, blame the marketers, the distributors, the content owners, but not the lawyers who sent the takedown notices -- they were just doing their jobs.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]