« A Vernacular Web | Main | Podcasting for Profit » SMS.ac vs Ito (and the world?)"Kevin B. Jones, Esq." of SMS.ac sent Joi Ito a cease-and-desist email saying "UNLESS YOU IMMEDIATELY CEASE AND DESIST YOUR ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED" but failing to say exactly what Joi's done that's "illegal." The email includes a paragraph that says "CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY PROPERTY OF SMS.ac AND MAY NOT BE COPIED, PUBLISHED, OR DISCLOSED TO OTHERS." Since Joi (being Joi) posted it on his blog, the company now wants to claim that he's infringed copyright. Joi's not the only one to get this email. Evidently the company is going after sites that question their business practices. There's an interesting conversation about sms.ac at Rip-Off Report, including posts by current and former employees of sms.ac. And there's also an interesting Infoworld article about SMS.ac CEO Michael Pousti's earlier company, CollegeClub. In Joi's case, the supposedly "illegal" material may have been this post,: I received an email inviting me to SMS.ac, which I would normally ignore, but it was from someone who's judgment I trust. I clicked through the signup process without finally completing it, but unwittingly gave the service access to my MSN IM information. This spammed my whole buddy list with invitations. It was unintuitive to unregister even though I hadn't completed the registration process. Also, I heard from someone that if you don't unregister, the service continues to send invites to people you add to your buddy list. Anyway, I have no idea if the service is interesting, but the the fact that you invite your whole buddylist before you actually try the service and the difficulty and deleting your account makes me skeptical about it.It appears that SMS.ac is aggressively trying to stamp out bad "press," though I suggest they would be more effective with dialog than with legal threats. [Link to Joi's post about the cease-and-desist letter] jon posted this at 8:47 AM |
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