Via: Flickr
As most of my readers know I’m a fathful follower of The Passive Voice, in my opinion the best website out there for self-publishers.
A little background. TPV is run by a lawyer who’s wife writes Historical Romance. He describes himself as “an attorney who works with contracts – negotiating them, writing them, analyzing them and helping clients understand them.”
“I have experience, including litigation experience, with a wide variety of contracts.”
So imagine the amount of laughter generated when I saw this on his blog today.
In short, PG blogged about a certain publishing companys contract provisions some time back and today they sent him a blanket take-down notice in an effort to get him to remove the commentary, specifically that which calls out their gotcha clauses, clauses that basically screw the author out of their copyright.
The funny part; they did this without ever checking who they were sending it to!
Sending such a notice to a contract lawyer with an internet following of over 50,000 author/visitors a day is not really a wise thing to do if your intent is to supress the information. As a bonus PG sent them this for a reply;
It’s really dumb to try to squelch opinions you don’t like by using a DMCA takedown notice. It only aggravates people.
If you feel that something on this blog is incorrect or unfair, go to the Contact Page and send me an email. If I’ve made a mistake, I’ll correct it.
It’s particularly dumb to try to suppress opinions that appear on a blog that is viewed by hundreds of thousands of authors and their camp followers every year.
For one thing, some of the posts that appear on The Passive Voice generate comments on other blogs, complete with links back to the opinions here. Indeed, this post might generate excerpts, links and commentary about Autharium’s contract terms in many places. Who would ever think that a discussion about bad terms of service might go viral?
Since the first post about Autharium, about a year ago, the audience for The Passive Voice has increased substantially so, thanks to your takedown notice, Autharium’s terms of service are even more famous now than they were then.
Love, kisses, lollipops and bluebirds,
Passive Guy
The first rule of war is Know your Enemy. Fireing into the crowd with threatening take-down notices just pisses people off. A lot of them.
Feel free to link to this or The Passive Voice link above. If it finds its way to an unaware author they will thank you.