AACS Lawyers Duplicate JL Kirk & Associates Stupidity
ATTENTION LAW FIRMS: Please heed this warning and save yourself some embarrassment by hiring a technology consultant to advise you of the potential consequences of writing cease and desist notices to website owners and/or bloggers.
By now it is likely that everyone in Knoxville and many people in other parts of the country have been made aware that JL Kirk & Associates has a reputation for using less then honest business practices thanks to their certified cease and desist letter to Katherine Coble from the law firm of King & Ballow.
I am not going to go into all of the details which you can read from NIT, but the letter was sent to provoke Katherine to take down an earlier post she made on her blog, which at the time probably had a readership somewhere in the range of 100 visits/day. After the firestorm that was sparked in the local blogosphere, and as a direct result of the cease in desist letter sent to Mrs. Coble, her blog was linked to over 700 times and the news went from a local story to a national story.
Fast forward 3 weeks and read this article from Brittney at Nashville Is Talking . Guess who made the same mistake? Yep, using the proven technique of the technologically ignorant cease and desist letter, the AACS just made the world aware of the encryption key for HD DVD and of their own accord generated more news articles, blog posts, and images that divulge the key then they could censor in 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees.
Moral of the story: Don’t write a cease and desist letter to a blogger or website owner unless you have a legitimate case and have every intention of backing it up with costly litigation. Further, if you do decide to pursue legal action, don’t be surprised when the information you were trying to keep very private becomes very public.
Finally, if you are a law firm and you need advice from an experienced technology consultant, I happen to know a few lawyers that are also technology experts. Feel free to use the contact page and I will put you in touch with them (a free service provided by the Knoxville Tennessee Blog).
