This is wild. ZiffDavis/EWeek sent a threatening letter to pocketpctools.com for quoting one of their articles with a link back to the EWeek site. About two hours later, on a Sunday night, a ZD/EW rep had managed to get the entire action abandoned and written a letter of retraction that Slashdot published. That’s pretty amazing: I think that even the highest-priced attorney in the land would be hard pressed to get that kind of action in that timeframe.
“Hey! I’m the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com — and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:
“While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!
“We’re moving to correct the situation now … PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette — actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic — and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.
“My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly.”