Boing Boing reader John says,
The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org‘s IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.
From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:
“On behalf of Facebook, the law firm
Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek
from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts
center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web
2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be
welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and
electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this
situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn’t
have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)”
BB reader John asks, “Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?”
More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook’s efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.