Sunday, February 22. 2009Last.fm, last legs?Trackbacks
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It's not "irresponsible bloggers" - it's just plain old-fashioned bad journalism, Daily Mail-style.
One of my golden rules is that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered correctly with the word "no". Journalists use that style of headline because they know the story is probably false - if they had the sources and facts to back it up, they'd use a more assertive headline. That, of course, is which the aforementioned Mail uses it so often - and why TechCrunch used it this time.
Its close to the wind though - this must be close to libel with material damages.
Not under US law, where you have to demonstrate (basically) that it was malicious, rather than just factually inaccurate.
And suing would be a PR disaster for Last.fm. That's something that's rarely acknowledged these days - getting the legal guns out, even when totally in the right, is usually a disaster for any company when you're up against the media.
A libel suit is an expensive bad idea but...
Last.fm could sue in the UK, especially as the accusation implies they could be in breach of the Data Protection Act - that would qualify as "lowering them in the estimation of right-thinking members of society". And in the US, they could argue that Techcrunch does not have the absence of malice defence given that Last.fm provided a rebuttal which directly contradicts the claim "Last.fm...actually handed the data over to the RIAA", complete with emphasising italics. But, I'm not sure what the material damages really are. You'd have to equate the deleted scrobbles of non-paying users to value from a sizeable audience but probably one that is way smaller than Last.fm's potential audience. I'm guessing there are more people who like music recommendation services than those who care deeply about the machinations of Web 2.0 startups. And ninthly, users can never entirely control their own data. I don't own the fact that I exist. |
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