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Q: What is the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?
I've been C&D'd!
Gosh, now I feel like a REAL blogger!
C&D, for those of you who have never had the honor, stands for "Cease and Desist". There is a whole cottage industry of law firms who do nothing but spend their day scouring the Internet looking for things they (well, their clients, really) don't like and then sending bogus threatening letters to people demanding that they cease and desist from doing whatever it is that's gotten a hair across some corporate wanker's ass.
Because, after all, nothing threatens giant multinational corporations more than some geek with a website who uses a name that sounds vaguely like theirs, or makes their logo the same as their "patented" color scheme, or, as in my case, redistributes a font.
Eeeeeeeeeep! Oh NOES! You're distributing a FONT??!?!eleven11
I can hear you gasping in shocked disbelief even now.
Yes. When I brought my site back online last year, I decided I liked the look of one of the fonts Microsoft had come up with for Windows Vista. It's called "Candara", and it's a sophisticated sans-serif style that I think looks especially nice in the smaller sizes. So I specified Candara in my style sheet AND, since most people aren't using Vista, I found a site that had the fonts, downloaded them, re-upped them to my own site and put up a link for people to get the font so the site would look good.
I suppose I should count myself lucky for not ending up at Guantanamo.
Ah, you argue, you are costing Microsoft BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars in lost revenue by STEALING their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.
To which I reply...bullshit. Microsoft went out of their way to make sure those fonts got given away long before Vista hit the streets, and now that Vista is actually for sale, the fonts are included with the installer but are in absolutely NO way central to the function or operation of the software. They are an aesthetic enhancement with zero commercial value, and Microsoft essentially gives them away in every single copy of Vista and Microsoft Office they sell, which, poor sales figures notwithstanding, still numbers in the millions.
This is not to say that fonts in and of themselves don't have some commercial value. There are a number of companies that design fonts and sell them (at fairly steep prices, I might add) to people who would make professional use of them: graphic artists, publishers, and so on. There's some futility to this enterprise, to be sure, because from the earliest days of the use of typeface on computer displays, people have been freely distributing and sharing fonts. The industry likes to position this as "piracy", in the same vein as music sharing, but has had very little success in making it stick because fonts are basically unnecessary and frivolous to 99.999% of computer users.
Anyway, to argue that I am preventing Bill Gates from stacking more bags of money in his giant vault is ingenuous and less than compelling.
Still, they persist. Lawyers are always looking for a way to remove the money from their clients' pockets, and they've managed to convince enough companies that there's something to be gained by harassing people over insignificant details. And, sadly, the American court system, bought and paid for by big business has time and again supported this bullshit argument by giving decision after decision on so-called "infringement" suits to the big corporations. So they won't give up until they have squeezed every imaginable nickel out of this scam. Hooray for America!
Well, my first instinct was that it was just some silly e-mail spam. But then I got a couple more e-mails, all from the same poor beleaguered paralegal who has gotten stuck with the miserable task of scouring site after site for any manner of "infringement" and firing off some boilerplate saber-rattling C&D letter from her boss. I took a moment to look up the firm involved, and they do indeed seem to be the sort of scum-sucking bottom dwellers who flourish in this environment of unbridled greed and unmatched stupidity, so I decided that they were probably for real.
I e-mailed them back, and though I was originally going to tell them to piss off, I finally decided it would be sufficient to get rid of the link they don't like and then post this. Which I told them I was going to do. Except I told them I was going to do it on Monday. So they hit my site like 150 times looking for it. I am usually lucky to have 10-15 visitors a day, so the spike in my traffic was pretty impressive, but otherwise I don't know what they thought they were going to get by reloading my front page 150 times in the space of an hour. It's certainly not enough to clog the server. Maybe they just like hearing about themselves. Maybe the paralegal is just bored out of her tits sending letter after letter to countless thousands of bloggers who have somehow transgressed in the eyes of Microsoft.
So, just let me say that this site STILL looks best when you have the Candara font installed. And while I won't be giving it away anymore, there are at least 24,000 other places on the Internet where you can get it for free. Unless that paralegal has been AWFULLY busy.
First, congrats on the C&D. It is like a club initiation isn't it?
I had no idea where Candara came from. I don't even know where I picked it up and I can tell you it was free when I got it because I don't steal the fonts nor do I pay for them which limits my options to only about 234,987 options. I do like it much. I use it all the time. Now I suppose I'm going to have to pony up some bucks to own the thing.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 03/ 8/07
Yes, it is somewhat surprising to think that I could be blogging for the better part of seven years and never once have gotten a C&D from somebody.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 03/ 8/07
Mircosoft blows. I am mostly affected by their search engine, as I am a search marketer. They suck with service for thier advertisers... And they suck at many more things. But hey, they do have their own soda now...
Posted by The Missus [URL] at 03/ 8/07
I thought Candara was an artificial sweetener. Congrats on the C&D.
Posted by Andrew [URL] at 03/ 8/07
Given the nature of my blog, I'm sort of shocked I haven't received a C&D letter yet. Sounds like quite the fun ordeal.
Posted by Labelscar [URL] at 03/ 9/07
Damn...I've been blogging for almost six years now, and I'm STILL waiting for my first C&D. What am I doing wrong? You'd think I would have pissed SOMEONE off sufficiently by now....
You're my hero, Brian! :0)
Posted by Jack Cluth [URL] at 03/12/07
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