Web page assignment leads to cease and desist letter. | Hacker News Reader

Web page assignment leads to cease and desist letter.

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

192 pointsPanos18 comments

You have an interesting blog there with a unique perspective (http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/can-crowd... as an example). Given that this is your first (visible) submission since you registered 553 days ago, I'm sure it would be the pleasure of many here if we saw your posts being submitted more often.

Thanks! I was not aware that a more general audience would be interested in what I am writing. I am writing mainly to organize my own thoughts.

As I read your post I thought you were going to threaten to sue him for edging out your blog.

Well, I guess if you wanted an outside validation of the effectiveness of the student's work, a C&D is probably not a bad objective measure.

A goal of the the assignment is to create a site that shows up at the top of the search results for a query. I wonder if the student created the silly sounding C&D letter with the goal of generating page rank improving links back to his site from discussion in the blogsphere about the letter.

In that case, he gets an A in class and gets immediately hired by WPP as senior manager of viral marketing.

Law school assignment leads to takedown of real website.

Could it be that this letter was written automatically by software using a template? Maybe they have thousands of auto-generated sites and this is an automated scare tactic they use on their perceived competitors?

That explanatory model makes some sense, but then there's the specifics where they complain about the sort order: "The listing of the dates on your monthly playlists go in ascending order rather than descending. This is just one of the many flaws of your clearly haphazardly designed website."

Are lawsuits really that cheap to file?

Hi Panos. My younger brother is in your class and I feel it is my duty to inform you that the kid has the creativity, work ethic, and street smarts to do big things, remarkably taking after his older brother. He's got my last name, and he deserves an A.

We were talking about what the legalities were for a class project like this if a student were to upload pirated content, etc. Who'd be responsible?

Wow, this is something :) - As noted in the comments it might have been from a student

I'm going to guess that it was a fellow student.

I'm not sure about New York, but it costs more than $8.00 in court fees to file a small claims action where I live. While it's true that people don't always act rationally with money, this seems a little too odd to be real.

Even if it is a prank, it is just awesome :-)

But the subsequent letter (not in the blog post), almost hints that the guy is just a crank.

Do share! This cheered me up!

I would actually have found the C&D letter more convincing if it hadn't been so well written.

Still funny though.

I was thinking it's too odd to be fake.

I think it's probably real. Having played with similar concepts which skirt the copyright issue in similar ways, there are plenty of people out there who send out templated C&D letters to stop similar competition.

I've seen a handful of these in my career as an Search Engine Optimizer. I often ignore them since there is good chance it is a scam and the author of the e-mail may not even be affiliated with the website in question.

Holy shit. Who says alien beings do not walk among us?

Give the whatever-the-heck-it-is its $7.34 so they don't zap us.

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