First amendment rights, anyone? Of course, we are talking about an upstanding company like IGE.
A few days ago, NCsoft designer Scott Jennings wrote an article on his personal blog about the sordid history of gold-selling industry giant IGE. The lawyers of Brock Pierce, former IGE CEO, were quick to jump on his post and sent him a nasty e-mail telling him to remove it from his site. Criticism of the take-down notice has sprung up from several other blogger/designers, including Ryan Shwayder (38 Studios) and Matt Mihaly (Iron Realms and Sparkplay Media), and the post has already been mirrored at a number of other sites despite Scott Jennings reluctantly agreeing to remove it from his.
Ive just received this charming note from Brock Pierces lawyer regarding the Debonneville v. Pierce lawsuit.
It has come to our attention that you have made postings on the website www.brokentoys.org that violate the United States District Courts Order sealing the Complaint in that case.
To avoid further harm resulting to our client from the violation of the Courts sealing Order, we hereby demand that by no later than the close of business tomorrow (February 15, 2008) you: (1) take down your January 30, 2008 article discussing the allegations in the sealed document and (2) send our office all copies of the Complaint in your possession, custody or control.
Well, I certainly would not want to violate the spirit or letter of such a nice notice, even if their information on where I live is somewhat out of date and no other attempt was made to contact me before this. So, of course, late tomorrow afternoon, Ill edit this post and remove the offending information. That should make everyone happy, right? It *is* what they asked for!
You can read more about the whole mess and find the links to the other blogs in our forums.
