Few lessons in life are as obvious as the one which follows after placing your hand on a burning stove. If you're lucky, you learned this lesson watching someone else get burned. As Warren Buffett says, it's better to learn from someone else's mistakes rather than your own.
Yet, big companies still like to throw their weight around, even when they risk escalating a situation into a PR disaster. The best, recent example of this was the AACS Licensing Authority's reaction to the publication of various AACS encryption keys online. By sending out threats to web site operators, they ensured that the keys would be posted all over the Internet, and the matter drew national headlines. Not exactly the best way to keep things quiet.
Dell stepped in a similar mess last week when a former kiosk sales staffer wrote an article for the Consumerist which listed 22 tips for getting the best deal out of Dell. The PC giant reacted by sending a legal threat, although kindly worded. What followed, of course, made Dell look heavy-handed and out of touch.
The silliest thing about it all is that the 22 tips are by and large all well-known strategies for getting the best deal out of Dell. There's nothing in the list that's damaging to Dell or particularly revealing—at least, certainly no more damaging than what could already be found on forums across the Internet.
For its part, Consumerist replied with the tried-and-true maxim of the publisher: it's not our problem that you have a leak. "We came by this material entirely legally: we were provided it by a third party voluntarily, we did not use any improper means to solicit any Dell employee to breach any agreement he may have had with you," they wrote. "Therefore, we do not believe we are in breach of any law in reporting on this material and, as such, cannot comply with your demands."
Dell has since seen the error of its ways, posting a mea culpa on its corporate blog entitled "Dell's 23 Confessions." Confession #1: "Okay, we goofed. We shouldn't have sent a notice. To my earlier point, we appreciate the reminder from the community. Point taken."
This is a smart move by Dell, and it shows that the company is paying attention to users. Of course, it would have been smarter to avoid the whole fiasco, but by publicly apologizing and then listing off a number of their own tips (mostly sedated "rah-rah, Dell" stuff), Dell comes off looking less clueless than it could have.
I wish I could tell you that takedown requests were a rare thing in this business, but they're not. We receive them on a pretty regular basis, and we have yet to comply with a single one. So many of them end with "oh sorry, that was a mistake," that we're left to believe that these companies still feel like it's okay to try and bully smaller publishers, even when they know they don't have a leg to stand on. There's got to be more productive ways to spend that money than on lawyer's fees, but as one recent lawyer told me, the status quo is still shoot first, ask questions later.
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