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Yeah, I agree, they're trying to jerk Arrington around here. Now fortune may have not had rights to let Arrington post it, but that's their issue most likely,
by gte910h 17y ago
Yeah, I agree, they're trying to jerk Arrington around here.
Now fortune may have not had rights to let Arrington post it, but that's their issue most likely, as they misrepresented it, not Arrington
The first emails from them clearly are talking about excerpts in their entirety.
- greyman 17y agoHard to say...they wrote to "post on excerpts", but not "post excerpts". But obviously, what would Mike gain by only posting excerpt of the excerpt? Anyone can do that without asking permission from Fortune, it's just normal blogging practice. Now when I think about it, Fortune looks even more ridiculous in my eyes. They basically asked TC to blog about their promotional article for free. ;-)
- dkarl 17y agoI agree; to me, the email says that the post would be about the excerpts, and the excerpts themselves were provided simply because they weren't live on the Fortune site yet. The email quotes in the post do NOT say he is going to post the excerpts. In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch. He simply misread the emails. With the benefit of hindsight, he should see that they don't confirm his side of the story, which makes the blog post seem... weird. (Usually when you read just one guy's side of an issue, you don't come out of it thinking he's probably wrong.) At best, they're ambiguous. I think the natural reading favors Fortune, and I would say that if they're the best evidence he has, and he posted the excerpts based on these emails, then he's clearly wrong. But maybe he was misled by other communication.
- nostromo 17y agoWell, except the part where they email him saying, thank you great post.
- dkarl 17y agoAnd six minutes later, after they actually read the post, they had a substantive response. It's the classic email pattern of respond, then read, then really respond, aka, "I just noticed your email is full of words and decided to take a closer look." Except here the initial email was actually a blog post.
- Alex3917 17y ago"In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch." The actual email says that he is offering TC the rights to use the exclusive material: "I’d love to chat with you about FORTUNE’s exclusive excerpt of David Kirkpatrick’s book on Facebook, which I’d love to offer for tomorrow."
- megablast 17y agoThe advantage Michael got was that he got early access to the excerpts, so he could write about them and link to fortune, before anyone else. This is the standard way things work. But I love Michaels repsonse, good on him. Unless they explicitly say, DO NOT USE THE ENTIRE EXCERPT, go for it. I mean, fortune and the author sent thank you emails just after they were posted, either they did not read it properly, or they were not clear themselves on the licensing situation. It looks to me like the contact at fortune made the mistake, didn't check properly, and is trying to lay the blame on techcrunch. This is also, the standard way things work.