How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outfitters

Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by fingerprinter on Saturday May 28, 2011 @05:07AM (#2594185)

I don't mean to steal the thunder from the poster, but I highly doubt it matters. At all.

Just like the indignation with Apple over the closed iPhone, or the terms of service or a host of other things didn't really matter. Or all the flack given to MS (bing stealing search results), or Oracle (mishandling the community, Patent trolling) or Google (not releasing source code, ripping off open source) or IBM (offshoring nearly their entire workforce), non of it really seems to matter.

Everyone loves these stories, the little guy calling out the big guy and showing them what's what. But does it change anything? Does it impact the bottom line of that company? I can't think of a single time that it did, either immediately or over time.

Don't get me wrong, I would like it to matter, but in an age of millions of users, billions of dollars, 100s or even 1000s of people being aware of something and starting grassroots campaigns will result in a speedbump at best or a blip at worst for these mega corporations. Think of facebook and the guff they got about their TOS, twitter and their killing off of competing apps. Non of it mattered; people moved on continued to use those services because it was easy, because it was what they knew and because, in the end, people will default to cheap, cool and easy.

Just the reality of the situation, IMO.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by coryl on Saturday May 28, 2011 @05:21AM (#2594196)

Doesn't it matter to the artist? - Urban Outfitters apparently pulled their jewelry from stores

- indie artist gets ton of free press and national attention

cost = nothing. benefit = something.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by rmc on Saturday May 28, 2011 @06:10AM (#2594233)

But does it change anything?

In this case, Yes. The company pulled the infringing piece of jewlery.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by fingerprinter on Saturday May 28, 2011 @06:32AM (#2594251)

I would call that a soft win. Urban Outfitters is still in business, still printing money, still going to infringe in the future and people will forget their transgression in a matter of days.

Great, they pulled the particular piece because they got enough negative attention. How many other things on their shelves are infringing that we don't hear about? The point remains that an even if this one case was "won", it won't change anything. Companies have, do and will continue to run over people because the vast majority of people simply do not care.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by RexRollman on Saturday May 28, 2011 @09:41AM (#2594414)

The effort changed what needed to be changed. I really don't know what you would consider a "win" but it was a win for the effected artist.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by DevX101 on Saturday May 28, 2011 @08:24AM (#2594337)

If an incident like this occurs two more times this year, the company could be in real trouble. Their target customers are on Twitter/Facebook and will probably hear about this fiasco.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by chopsueyar on Saturday May 28, 2011 @09:07AM (#2594388)

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=URBN+Interactive#chart1:s...

It did not seem to affect their stock price.

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Re:How Twitter and a community put a smackdown on Urban Outf... by RexRollman on Saturday May 28, 2011 @09:38AM (#2594412)

Since the goal wasn't to effect their stock price that really doesn't matter.

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