How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO

Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by Silhouette on Sunday March 20, 2011 @09:36AM (#2346231)

Hang on a minute. This is about an "op-ed" article that included quotes (as in, contained in quotation marks) that don't appear to accurate, investment advice (allegedly comical or otherwise), and outright derogatory comments (without any justification given). Moreover, the follow-up article republished private correspondence without permission, and is trying to justify its trash article based on some sort of journalistic high ground argument.

Frankly, while I wouldn't have put things the same way, I think the guys from Hashable have every right to be upset, and the web site that upset them is lucky not to be discovering the hard way why serious newspapers have a full time legal department. Their posts have been, IMNSHO, about one step in maturity about the five-year-old in the playground who says something really hurtful to another child, and then tries to make things better by saying "But I was only joking!".

Oh, and the blog post about the whole sorry affair seems to think that communications with journalists are somehow exempt from the usual rules regarding privacy, IP rights and, frankly, common courtesy. I suspect this is not a position that either responsible journalists or lawyers would agree with (as the former would have checked if they were on the record in a case of doubt, and the latter wouldn't assume their personal view trumped what the law actually says).

Does the person who wrote the linked blogpost (on spiers.tumblr.com) have any connection to the betabeat.com site that started this whole mess?

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by brown9-2 on Sunday March 20, 2011 @10:55AM (#2346391)

I agree about some of your points, but I don't believe that you have any reasonable expectation of privacy when emailing a person you have never communicated with before or that they won't republish your emails without first gaining your permission (IANAL).

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by rboyd on Sunday March 20, 2011 @11:36AM (#2346467)

What constitutes "off the record"? Is it exactly and only those words? From Mr. Yavonditte's Twitter stream:

http://twitter.com/#!/mikeyavo/status/48902730730844160

"@EvilPRGuy the only part of email they didn't print was me saying that I was not willing to comment publicly - you live and learn"

It's also pretty obvious that his response was meant to convey some intent to sue and not a challenge to a gunfight at high noon.

Anything for some hits, I guess. Slap a custom wordpress theme on it and call it journalism.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by ig1 on Sunday March 20, 2011 @11:43AM (#2346492)

I don't know about in the US but in the UK it's certainly the case that there's a default expectation of privacy.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by Silhouette on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:30PM (#2347470)

As much as I'd like to think that's true (being in the UK and a privacy advocate myself) I've never seen anything that would "certainly" describe the legal position in this case, such as a precedent from a case in one of the higher courts. Are you just talking about something like the general privacy right under the ECHR, or something more specific to e-mail?

I've found various opinions on-line from UK-based commentators suggesting that if an e-mail isn't explicitly marked or otherwise understood to be confidential, and it didn't contain any sort of privileged information or information that would normally be expected to remain private, then it wouldn't automatically attract protection under any privacy law. Most of these related to an individual republishing messages send on behalf of a corporate body rather than the other way around, though.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by ig1 on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:48PM (#2347518)

There's nothing email specific, although a company couldn't republish an email from an individual without breaching the data protection act.

If the information in an email has no indication (explicit or implicit) that it should remain private, then I agree there's no legal reason why the recipient can't disclose the information from the email

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by Silhouette on Sunday March 20, 2011 @11:12AM (#2346419)

IANAL either, but in light of casual conversations with those who are: you own copyright in any work you create by default, including any communications you send, and furthermore there are expectations of privacy attached to many professional communications by default, though this varies a lot by jurisdiction and the nature of the parties and relationship or potential relationship involved.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by tptacek on Sunday March 20, 2011 @11:33AM (#2346455)

You cannot claim "copyright" to prevent a reporter from publishing an email you sent them.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by Silhouette on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:11PM (#2347421)

Says who? For example, has anything relevant changed in the US (which seems to be the relevant jurisdiction here) since this post by a lawyer in 2007?

http://arborlaw.biz/blog/2007/07/17/legal-issues-in-forwardi...

A few minutes of Google-fu finds several essentially similar articles over the past few years.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by tptacek on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:17PM (#2347438)

No matter how much you focus your nerd powers, you are not going to prove that's it's unlawful for a reporter, having received an email addressed to the reporter, to report on that email. Please stop trying.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by Silhouette on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:24PM (#2347455)

You did read the article I posted that was written by a lawyer, right? Or spend even two minutes Googling for similar articles by other lawyers?

I think one of us is trying to convince himself that he's right despite the absence of any supporting data, but I'm afraid you might be mistaken about which of us it is.

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by tptacek on Sunday March 20, 2011 @05:54PM (#2347528)

I'd respond to your article with quotes to point out how you're misunderstanding it, but I might violate its copyright and subject myself to needless lawsuits. (You can have the last word now; I'll stop being snarky in response.)

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Re:How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO by zaidf on Sunday March 20, 2011 @12:40PM (#2346642)

betabeat.com--the valleywag without the funny--is owned by the observer of which Elizabeth Spiers is the Editor in Chief.

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