Russell Beattie Cease and Desist Letter
So an unfortunate thing happened to blogger Russell Beattie. He felt like he got conned and scammed into this text messaging service offered by SMS.ac and then blogged about it. Very quickly he found himself on the short end of "cease and desist" letter from law firm McDermit, Will and Emery. They write, "your statements regarding SMS.ac are false and without merit, and your website entry is cleary designed to unfairly depict SMS.ac through false representations and statements and to drive subscribers away from SMS.ac. SMS.ac highly values its strong relationship with its subscribers and is committed to maintaing that relationship. We are informed that you currently work for Yahoo and, if this is the case, it is additionally distressing that you are continuing to publicly maintain such false and anticompetitive statments."
WTF? A blogger blogs about a bad experience he has with a shitty product and he gets this? He gets personally threatened (enough that he's now taken the post down) and what's all this about bringing his employer into it? It would seem to me that Beattie didn't like the service and blogged about it and now they want to get Yahoo! his work involved? This is outright bullying and shouldn't be tollerated. So in the spirit of free speech, contained in this post are the original post that Russell wrote, his pulled post, and his cease and desist letter (isn't Google cache a lovely thing). By the way McDermott, Will & Emery, if you want to try and squash this one some more you might try going back to Yahoo! one more time as I'm currently hosting these images of your letter and Russell's post on another Yahoo! service called Flickr.
And SMS.ac. Really stupid move. This is only going to further highlight how crappy your service is. Threatening bloggers is probably not the best PR strategy. How about trying to be a part of the conversation instead?
Thanks for the tip Tom!
Russell Beattie Cease and Desist Letter
So an unfortunate thing happened to blogger Russell Beattie. He felt like he got conned and scammed into this text messaging service offered by SMS.ac and then blogged about it. Very quickly he found himself on the short end of "cease and desist" letter from law firm McDermit, Will and Emery. They write, "your statements regarding SMS.ac are false and without merit, and your website entry is cleary designed to unfairly depict SMS.ac through false representations and statements and to drive subscribers away from SMS.ac. SMS.ac highly values its strong relationship with its subscribers and is committed to maintaing that relationship. We are informed that you currently work for Yahoo and, if this is the case, it is additionally distressing that you are continuing to publicly maintain such false and anticompetitive statments."
WTF? A blogger blogs about a bad experience he has with a shitty product and he gets this? He gets personally threatened (enough that he's now taken the post down) and what's all this about bringing his employer into it? It would seem to me that Beattie didn't like the service and blogged about it and now they want to get Yahoo! his work involved? This is outright bullying and shouldn't be tollerated. So in the spirit of free speech, contained in this post are the original post that Russell wrote, his pulled post, and his cease and desist letter (isn't Google cache a lovely thing). By the way McDermott, Will & Emery, if you want to try and squash this one some more you might try going back to Yahoo! one more time as I'm currently hosting these images of your letter and Russell's post on another Yahoo! service called Flickr.
And SMS.ac. Really stupid move. This is only going to further highlight how crappy your service is. Threatening bloggers is probably not the best PR strategy. How about trying to be a part of the conversation instead?
Thanks for the tip Tom!