Research 2000 Sends Cease & Desist To FiveThirtyEight For Discussing DailyKos Concerns
from the wow dept
Want to know how to take a bad situation and make it significantly worse? Check this out. We were just discussing how the website DailyKos was going to sue its former pollster after an investigation turned up fairly compelling evidence that the data it presented was either faked or manipulated. Pretty quickly, a few folks sent over the news that Nate Silver, at the always fascinating FiveThirtyEight, (though, frankly, I miss his Baseball Prospectus work...) had received a cease & desist from R2K's law firm: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.
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Filed Under: defamation, fivethirtyeight, stats, streisand effect
Companies: dailykos, fivethirtyeight, research 2000
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Yeah, I get that. But wouldn't it make more sense to sue (counter sue?) DKOS or someone more directly associated with the case rather than some one who amounts to a bystander who is reporting on the action? Christ, I dunno, frankly I need to give up on second-guessing these guys.
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Opinion?
Given that he has the math to back him up, I'm not even sure that's an 'opinion statement.'
Good thing this isn't the UK!
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Baseball Prospectus
I didn't know you were a rotogeek too :-)
I'm sure that I just missed it, but have you ever addressed the success of paywall sites like Baseball Prospectus and Baseballhq.com ?
In arenas like fantasy baseball (or stock trading), some information is actually valuable enough to pay for...and is made more valuable by the fact that others do NOT have it. Right?
While there is understandable concern about general news sites turning to paywalls to survive, it appears that some types of information sites can thrive under that business model.
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Re: Baseball Prospectus
Value and price are not the same thing.
"it appears that some types of information sites can thrive under that business model."
The fact that a monopolist can survive, or even make more money, with a monopoly does not justify the government granting monopolies (ie: copy protections).
The question to be asked isn't, "can monopolies make money and survive" it's, "what's better for society as a whole" and the lack of monopolies is better both for innovation and aggregate output and consumer surplus.
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Re: Baseball Prospectus
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Re: Baseball Prospectus
Amusingly, I just made my decision to drop my BP subscription, because I get just as good info from other sites for free these days and have pretty much stopped using BP.
In arenas like fantasy baseball (or stock trading), some information is actually valuable enough to pay for...and is made more valuable by the fact that others do NOT have it. Right?
It's not about value. As we've described plenty of times before, value and price are not the same thing. It's about supply. And, yes, we've said that with things like great financial information obviously there's value in the scarcity of being first to have it, so people will pay for it. But with things like BP, that only worked when there wasn't serious free competition. With fantastic commentary for free on blogs these days, and sites like THT, there's less and less reason to pay for BP. On top of that, it seems like other projection systems, many of which are available for free in some format, are more reliable than PECOTA (Silver's original contribution).
While there is understandable concern about general news sites turning to paywalls to survive, it appears that some types of information sites can thrive under that business model.
Sure. I've always said that it's about supply and demand. If you really have unique information that has direct value, you can get people to pay for it. But you have to be sure that you can retain that lead in the marketplace. BP hasn't... and there's now lots of free competition that makes BP subscriptions not worth the money any more.
I actually think the site could do much better these days as a free site.
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Re: Re: Baseball Prospectus
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I just like the progression on fivethirtyeight.
followed by commentary "Although I expect to proceed fairly carefully with respect to Research 2000"
then after he is "sent a cease and desist demand by Howrey LLP, the lawfirm that Research 2000 has contracted"
he then follows up with some of his own statistical analysis where he finds that "None of these alternate hypothesis exactly speaks well for Research 2000, as all would imply significant departures from what we ordinarily think of as sound and scientific polling practice."
awesome. serves them right.
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...Insert both feet fully in mouth to the knees
Not because he'd blast back with both barrels, not his style, but because the odds are what he did fire would hit and sink me on the first shot.
For the life of me I can't think of anyone in the polling business or who follows and reports on polling with more credibility than Silver and well deserved at that.
This is a perfect example of NOT how to threaten someone with a SLAP suit in the hopes of shutting them up.
In the words of Bugs Bunny: "What a maroon!!"
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