The funny thing is that I've now heard of Hashable. It's also the kind of service where any publicity really is good publicity. Would not be surprised to now see them posting record hits.
I like how it claims hashable is useless because it is useful to insecure people. As if that were a small market, or something people don't care deeply about.
Just wasted five minutes :
1> Journalist trashes Hashable in satirically laced 'opinion' piece
2> Hashable CEO fails to see anything funny and calls journalist/s liar(s)
3> Journalist posts sections of CEO's emails in a follow-up article
4> CEO gets upset and ... the loop shall continue
Considering my current impression of Hashable, which is derived from this and the original article. The original article seems to be dead on.
An insecure founder formed a company that builds product for other insecure people who then gather and cherish their fears together.
I think thats awesome!
What better way is there than to market such a product than through Streisand effect?
On a side note, what do you think of possibility that the original manifestation Streisand effect, was in fact just a signal from Barbra to her fans, that she is still as insecure as any of them?
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?
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
While it seems hard to believe anyone could take the quoted “Sorry bro, you’re not Hashable enough” as being an actual attributed quote, to avoid confusion the writer should probably have just italicized it.
