Jason Kottke’s recent experience with Sony has him reconsidering his role as a publisher. Is the hassle worth it?
Only big publishers have the budgets to deal with any hint of legal issues. I raised this issue at Lawrence Lessig’s Law & Blogging session at BloggerCon. Regardless of fair use, being on the right side of the law, it is difficult to gather the resources to respond to legal harassment. Lessig differentiated between a “nastygram” and an actual legal filing.
Jason has demonstrated good judgment and community building in the past. I received an e-mail from Jason before he pointed at one of my entries with a file hosted on my servers to let me know he would be willing to mirror the file if I had bandwidth issues. He has worked on projects such as Dropcash to help the weblog community raise funds.
Hopefully someone with a legal background will step in and help Jason tell Sony to go away and play with the MPAA some more instead.