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."

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9 Comments

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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.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2007 @ 4:24am

Re:
hypocrisy
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Me, 26 Jun 2007 @ 4:34am

Hypocrisy. Man I wish I owned the patent on that one!
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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!
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Rational Beaver, 26 Jun 2007 @ 10:12am

We've all been had! They obviously set this up to take advantage of the Streissand effect...
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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.
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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."
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yer' ol pirate, 26 Jun 2007 @ 12:52pm

Avast Mater, yer'all sho' them land-lovers what we w'nt! Tall'ho
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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.
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