Guy Who Bragged About How Bad Reviews Helped His Online Store's Ecommerce Ranking Arrested

from the so-much-for-that-plan dept

Remember the recent story of the ecommerce store operator who claimed he was thriving by being obnoxious, because all of the bad reviews were increasing his Google rank? It's been interesting to watch what's happened since that NY Times article was published. Within days, Google announced that it had tweaked its algorithms to deal with that and similar situations, noting that being bad to customers is unlikely to be a good long term business strategy. It also might lead to jail. The NY Times is now also reporting (as sent in by Robert Ring) that the guy profiled in that original story, Vitaly Borker, who seemed so proud of his angry tirades against customers, has now been arrested for mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. So much for that strategy.

Filed Under: ecommerce, reputation, threats

How Cooks Source Magazine Learned That Reputation Is A Scarce Good... As Reddit Applies The Social Mores Of Justice

from the reputation-is-a-scarce-good dept

One of the key points we've made over the years is that reputation is a scarce good, and doing something bad can be quite costly. In fact, in showing how social mores can often be much more effective than copyright laws in dealing with actions where someone is "wronged" by having their work copied in ways that appear to be unfair, we've suggested that social costs are a much more effective means of punishing those who do wrong.

As an example, check out this story, first sent in by slacker525600, but also submitted many more times, about how Cooks Source Magazine copied one woman's blog post and published it as an article, without asking her permission or letting her even know about it. They did put her name on it, but she only found out after a friend spotted it and told her about it. Where the story takes a bizarre twist is after emailing with the editor of the magazine, Judith Griggs, asked the original author, Monica, what she wanted. Monica suggested a public apology (on Facebook) and a modest $130 donation to Columbia's journalism school. That's when Griggs responded like this:

"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"

That response not only shows a rather confused understanding of copyright law, but also suggests someone who's kinda sorta heard arguments about why copying can be beneficial, and jumbled them all together in her head. Now, we've spent plenty of time over the years showing how content creators can be better off allowing their works to be copied, but even so, Grigg's response appears totally tone deaf to what Monica's actual concerns were. But here's where social mores and reputational value take over. Monica's story made it onto Reddit and it got picked up by tons of others, leading the Facebook page of Cooks Source to be filled with angry comments from people supporting Monica.

And, just like that, Cooks Source (and Judith Griggs') reputation gets knocked down quite a bit. Reputation is a scarce good, and doing things that people don't approve of can come back to bite you.

There are a few other interesting lessons out of this. First is that, contrary to what some people claim, you don't have to be a "big name" to make these things work for you. People have a sense of when someone has been genuinely wronged, and they step up. So, Monica was able to get attention for this, despite not being "famous" in the conventional sense. Second, contrary to the claims that the various "online mobs" that hang out in places like Reddit "just want everything for free," various online communities have always shown a willingness to stand up against situations where they feel someone was genuinely wronged. And that should give you an idea of what they really think of various situations where some record label complains about file sharing. It's a totally different situation, and people react accordingly.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, reputation, scarce goods, social mores
Companies: cooks source

Samsung Sues Satirist, Claiming Criminal Defamation, Over Satirical Column Poking Fun At Samsung

from the thin-skinned? dept

Mel alerts us to this story of Korean electronics giant, Samsung, and its decision to sue a freelance writer who penned a satirical Christmas column that poked fun at Samsung's well-known corruption and bribery issues. The writer, Michael Breen, a UK native who's been living in South Korea for a dozen years, wrote an English-language light satire (in English) for the Korea Times, where he joked about what sorts of presents public figures might send to others:

One item read that Samsung had sent to all employees photographs of the son of the firm's chairman with instructions for hanging the photo next to one of his father -- an allusion to North Korea's Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Breen also wrote that Samsung, "the rock upon which the Korean economy rests, sent traditional year-end cards offering best wishes for 2010 to the country's politicians, prosecutors and journalists along with [$50,000] gift certificates."

As satire goes, it seems pretty tame (and, really, not that funny). But, Samsung went ballistic, suing Breen, the Korea Times and its top editor for both civil and criminal libel charges. Supposedly, after Korea Times ran a "clarification" that was written by Samsung itself, the paper and its editor were dropped from the lawsuit, but the suit against Breen remains. And, since there are criminal charges, not only could he face hefty fines (perhaps $1 million), he might also face jailtime. For writing a satirical Christmas day column. Tough audience.

Apparently, Korean defamation laws aren't just draconian, but they're also downright ridiculous. Truth? Not a defense. Satire? Not a defense. Basically, if anything you say harms someone's reputation, you've defamed them. Even if it's true or you're just making a joke. As the LA Times notes, Samsung says it needs to do this to protect its reputation worldwide:

Since 80% of its revenues are from overseas, the firm is sensitive to any "minor accident or mistake" that could adversely affect its international reputation, the suit said.

Uh, perhaps there's just a cultural mistranslation, but the stories about Samsung's corruption and bribery scandals are pretty widely known. Nothing in that column was going to change that. And, I would argue that, outside of South Korea, filing this ridiculous, petty and vindictive lawsuit over a joke is much more likely to harm Samsung's reputation than the original column (which was probably barely read outside of South Korea). And, doesn't something seem completely wrong when Samsung seems more concerned that its reputation will be harmed more by satire about its well-known and well-documented bribery and corruption scandals than the actual bribery and corruption scandals. If the problem is Samsung's "reputation" on the line, then perhaps the company should have thought of that before getting involved in massive bribery and corruption efforts...

The article also notes how this is basically a sign of how dominant Samsung is in South Korea, and how it more or less has power over the newspapers, suggesting that no one is ever willing to criticize them -- and that it's really using this lawsuit as a warning shot. If true, that's a huge shame for South Korea. If a company is bullying people for just making jokes, just imagine what sort of shenanigans it goes through for people who are actually uncovering serious misdeeds at the company.

Filed Under: defamation, michael breen, reputation, satire, south korea
Companies: samsung

iPhone App Developer Backlash Growing

from the openness-is-a-good-thing dept

Early on, we predicted that Apple's walled garden approach to apps for the iPhone would lead to developer backlash. Even if it was successful at first, the obvious trajectory was that it wouldn't just lead to problems that drove developers away, but it would eventually limit application innovation, just as other competing platforms were getting good enough to match Apple's. We might not be all the way there yet, but the evidence is growing that the backlash is getting serious. Slashdot noted that some respected developers are ditching the iPhone app store and reader Andrew Fong alerts us to Paul Graham's well argued explanation of why Apple's setup is bad for developers, bad for innovation, bad for consumers and bad for Apple.

To summarize, it's bad for developers because they're distanced from their users, and can't quickly make changes and updates, since each change needs to go through Apple's long, mysterious and arbitrary approval process. On top of that, by creating a very real risk that Apple might not approve an app, developers have less incentive to put in the time. It's bad for innovation because you are putting a gatekeeper in front of any innovation. It's bad for consumers, because they can't do what they want and often the apps they get are lower quality than they would be otherwise, because developers cannot rapidly respond with necessary improvements and changes. Finally it's bad for Apple because it's driving away some talented developers who are useful in making the iPhone so powerful. As those developers move to other platforms, it will help those other platforms catch up, and potentially surpass the iPhone. But, perhaps more importantly, it's bad for Apple because it risks Apple's overall reputation. It makes it harder to hire top engineers:

There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems evil, the best programmers won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it's largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.

As for why Apple is making this mistake, Graham blames Apple's general view of the market:

They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.

If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now that software development has evolved from a small number of big releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn't understand that either. Their model of product development derives from hardware. They work on something till they think it's finished, then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution. The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version.

My guess is that there may be another reason: the perfectionist attitude at Apple. They don't want "bad" apps getting into the store, and certainly some people appreciate that. But the store has 100,000 apps right now, and most people are never going to see the vast majority of them. Having a few "bad apps" get in isn't a huge issue at this point, and certainly user-level reviews can help deal with that issue anyway. And, even if that is the biggest concern, why not at least allow non-approved apps to be viewed and downloaded, just without an official "apple seal of approval." Perhaps it made sense when Apple was first launching the store (though, even that seems questionable), but if it wants to continue to lead the market, it needs to break down that wall.

Filed Under: app store, developers, innovation, iphone, openness, reputation
Companies: apple

Filmmaker Sues Websites After Commenters Cost Him A Job

from the misdirected dept

Over the years, we've been threatened with lawsuits a few too many times -- almost always due to something that someone said in our comments. The pace of those threats has certainly increased over the years, but most are nothing more than angry bluster. In the few cases where it appears to be someone serious, we have our lawyers explain to them Section 230 in rather plain language, noting that suing us for something said by others in our forums will (1) get thrown out of court incredibly quickly and (2) probably only serve to bring a lot more attention to the comments they're so pissed off about. To date, this has always worked quite well.

Of course, other countries don't have Section 230 safe harbors, and so you get a lot more ridiculous lawsuits with someone blaming a forum owner for what people say in that forum. Hopefully, common sense prevails in those cases too... but you never know. A bunch of folks have sent in the story of a lawsuit in Australia where a filmmaker is suing some online forums for comments in those forums that the filmmaker believes cost him a job. Apparently, some folks agreed to a deal with him to produce a certain movie, but after finding those comments, they pulled out of the deal.

First of all, the filmmaker, Greg Smith, appears to be suing the wrong parties. Rather than those who actually made the comments, he's suing the owners of the web forums where the comments occurred. And, on top of that, he never contacted those forum owners about the comments in the first place (at least one says that the first he knew about the complaints was when the lawsuit was filed -- at which point he immediately removed the comments anyway). And, of course, all this has really served to do is call a lot more attention to the comments about Smith (and the way he handles such things).

Filed Under: australia, comments, filmmaker, greg smith, liability, reputation, section 230

Get Overly Aggressive With Your Trademark... And Watch Your Reputation Fall

from the can't-be-good-for-business dept

We wrote recently about how an author and her lawyer appeared to be quite overaggressive in trying to enforce the trademark on the title of a book she had written. As someone pointed out in the comments on that post, as the story has grown more popular, many people are coming out of the woodwork to express their displeasure with the book in the Amazon reviews. So, once again, it's a case where being overly aggressive on trademark is doing significant harm to business prospects.

Imagine, instead, if Susan Jeffers, rather than having her lawyer send a letter demanding credit, had simply emailed the author of the original blog post and said "Hey, this is a great blog post, and I've written this book you might be interested in, which even uses that same phrase you mentioned, 'feel the fear and do it anyway.' I'm sure you'd like the book, so let me send you a copy. Thanks!" Think what might have happened? The blogger would likely have been interested, seeing as the topic of the book is similar to what he writes about, and he might even write a review or mention her book positively in future blog posts. But, instead, she jumped to the legal route, and is now suffering the consequences.

Filed Under: reputation, susan jeffers, trademark

Questions Raised About Logo Artist Who Was Accused Of 'Stealing' From Himself

from the look-again dept

Well, well, well... a few folks have been sending in some of the investigations that have been going on concerning the logo designer, Jon Engle, who caused a big stir on a variety of sites (including ours) by claiming that he was being accused of infringing on his own logo artwork. However, as more people started investigating the matter, his story has become increasingly suspect, both with certain elements not adding up, and additional evidence suggesting that Engle himself may have, in fact, used images from others in the logos he had uploaded to sites. There are also some other claims that Engle had absolutely nothing to do with some of the logos that he said he designed. However, as the public scrutiny of Engle's story is spreading, Engle's reputation is taking a big hit -- showing how the damage done to one's own reputation by plagiarism can be punitive, even without invoking copyright law. Reputation is a scarce good... destroying it by lying and duping a bunch of folks is going to come back to bite you.

Filed Under: accusations, copyright, jon engle, logos, reputation

Social Pressure Can Solve The 'Copying' Problem Even Without Copyright

from the reputation-is-a-scarce-good dept

Whenever we talk about a world without copyright, people chime in about how awful it would be because someone can just "take" someone else's content and pretend it's their own. However, that's not nearly as easy as people make it out to be. As we've pointed out before, in many such cases, it won't take people long to figure out where the content really originated from, and the end result is that the "copyist" (especially if it's blatant, and they do little to improve the content) has their reputation slammed. And, since your reputation is a scarce good (often one of the most important in any business model), there is strong social pressure to stop any such copying.

Two recent examples demonstrate this in a very clear manner.

First, MAKE Magazine noted that publishers Klutz/Scholastic were publishing a book on BristleBots, small robots made out of toothbrush heads, and failed to credit the folks who had originally created BristleBots, a group called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, as an example of a simple, do-it-yourself, robot making system. It was a pretty blatant copy, from both the name to the design. And, while Klutz/Scholastic at first tried to claim that it was independently created, the similarities between the two made that difficult to believe. This resulted in a public outcry from many different sites, and Klutz/Scholastic finally agreed to back down and will credit the Evil Mad Scientists in all future releases. Notice that this didn't involve any copyright claims or lawsuits -- but pure public pressure, and the potential (serious) damage to Klutz/Scholatic's brand and reputation. Already, the reputation is damaged, and the company will likely be much more careful in the future.

Meanwhile, angry jonny points us to another example. The community over at the excellent website Metafilter discovered that the author of the webcomic User Friendly has been blatantly copying punchlines to his comics from the Metafilter community. It started with a single comparison in today's comic (here's the Metafilter comment and here's today's today's comic using a nearly identical punchline). Then, the Metafilter community started digging into a variety of User Friendly comics from the past few months and found repeated examples of the punchline coming from Metafilter comments -- often days after the comment (all of these examples found in the comments to the original Metafilter post):

• Metafilter comment from January 6
• User Friendly from January 12

• Metafilter comment from January 26
• User Friendly from February 16

• Metafilter comment from January 26
• User Friendly from February 13

• Metafilter comment from February 8
• User Friendly from February 12

• Metafilter comment from January 21
• User Friendly from January 27

The author of User Friendly is now scrambling to make things right after his initial attempt to pass the blame was trashed by most readers. Once again, even without a copyright claim (and I've made clear that I think the idea of copyrighting jokes is silly), it looks like social pressure and the hit to one's (scarce) reputation is often quite enough to punish blatant copyists. So, the idea that you somehow need "copyright" to prevent such copying is increasingly absurd. And, I should point out, that in both of these cases, the "copyists" were a lot more well known than those copied -- which puts to rest a second point copyright defenders often try to make: that if the copyist is big enough, no one will notice. That doesn't seem to be happening in practice.

Filed Under: bristlebots, copying, copyright, iliad, mad scientists, metafilter, reputation, user friendly
Companies: klutz/scholastic

Reputation Matters Among File Sharers

from the it-still-matters dept

Slate has an interesting article about someone (or a group of folks) under the name aXXo who is the "biggest name" in BitTorrent and consistently offers up high quality movies on a variety of BitTorrent platforms. Apparently, when aXXo uploads something, it's likely to become one of the top BitTorrent downloads on various sites. Since I don't use BitTorrent (or any file sharing system), I wasn't aware of this, but find the situation to be quite interesting. The fact that reputation "matters" in the file sharing world, definitely seems like something that moviemakers can use to their advantage.

If you have a somewhat obscure movie, and want more people to see it, rather than just putting it up for download, you're probably better off getting a "trusted party" to put it up for you. As the article notes, even the obscure movies that aXXo uploads become top downloads, because people trust aXXo, and trust is a valuable quality -- even in unauthorized file sharing. In some ways, this is similar to the whole "mixtape" phenomenon, where DJs put out unauthorized mixtapes that often are, technically, copyright infringement. Yet, the top DJs are so valuable that many record labels actively push their songs on them, knowing that if they include a song on a mixtape, it increases the popularity (and marketability) of the musicians. You could easily see the same thing happening with movies and other content as well.

Filed Under: axxo, file sharing, pirace, reputation

EA Brushes Off DRM Complainers As Fringe 0.2%

from the listening-to-your-customers dept

It would appear that gaming company EA got the wrong message concerning DRM after its Spore DRM debacle. While EA eventually backed down, it certainly did plenty to damage its own reputation in the gaming community. Hell, when we recently posted an article about EA that had nothing to do with DRM at all, a bunch of commenters used the post to complain about EA's DRM policy anyway. That suggests a Metallica-like reputation problem.

So, how is EA dealing with this reputation issue? Apparently by dismissing it as nothing to be concerned about. A whole bunch of our readers sent in this story about an EA exec claiming that only 0.2% of users would even notice the DRM used in Spore -- basically suggesting that the complaints were hyped up and out of proportion to the issue. That's sort of missing the point. While some users who complained might never actually encounter problems with the DRM, that doesn't mean that they're comfortable with the idea that EA has significantly limited how they can use a product that they purchased. Even a quick review of the history of DRM would show EA execs two things: it does nothing to stop piracy, and it seriously gets in the way of legitimate users, no matter how artfully designed.

Filed Under: customers, drm, reputation, spore
Companies: ea