From March 14, 2009:
DON'T FOLLOW ME
I AM NOT A REAL TUMBLE BLOG, I AM USED AS A FILTER
SINCE TUMBLR TOOK AWAY MY REAL FILTER.
I Have Found The Tumblr Filter
This Filter is Obsolete
Personally, I think there is enough blame to go around:
* Meaghan is probably trying to cover her ass because she over-stepped herself in removing this blog without notification to the user because she though it was abandoned.
* Tumbldore is just using this to generate drama and publicity. It's also possible that Tumbldore is just a giant troll that had this whopper of a piece of bait dumped onto his lap, so now he's just going to milk it for all it's worth.
http://tumbledore.tumblr.com/post/393276231/this-is-in-respo...
Just because they can, does it mean they should have? It doesn't seem like a fair assumption that the account is abandoned if there are a few posts form the past year, especially when Tumblr didn't contact the user (assuming they did not).
It sucks, but you get what you pay for.
I can't say that the original owner has made the best case for himself. Throwing around terms like "libel" and "exercise my right" is off-putting and makes it hard to empathize with him.
This is a more interesting to me as a Pitchfork copyright/trademark issue: http://pitchforked.com/ (Context here: http://twitter.com/zachklein/status/9188476155 )
I hope the guy doesn't get the smackdown after just building the site, but who knows. (A lawyer knows.)
So do they have the rights to pitchfork.wordpress.com, pitchfork.heroku.com and pitchfork.github.com ? Of course not.
This is not about IP, this is about a company doing their friends a favor. I will now stay away from tumblr. If I cease posting for a few months they could take my domain away.
You can trademark the name of an everyday object. See 'Apple' computers vs 'Apple' the music label. Now they only have a trademark dispute is someone in their industry has the apple.com or apple.github.com or whatever (e.g. if Microsoft or Dell registered apple.wordpress.com, Apple might have a case to take it away from them do to brand confusion -- which was the original reason for trademarks).
Microsoft could register apple.wordpress.com and use it to blog about apples (the fruit).
Edit: Spelling
- Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_domains
- FeedBurner MyBrand: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand
ROUND I
Pitchfork: Within 10 minutes, a tumblr representative responded: “Hi, Megan. Those URLs are now free. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. Thanks for using Tumblr!”
VS
Tumblr: "After you failed to respond for 72 hours, we released the domain."
VS
Tumbledore: "Tumblr stole my subdomain"
ROUND II
Tumblr: "There were not “several posts,” on that account, there were zero."
VS
Pitchfork: "...the last post that had been made was on November 18, 2009, and said, “This filter is obsolete.” [ includes screenshots of posts]
VS
Tumbledore: "I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account."
Someone is wrong on the internet!!!
The part about having 0 posts was explained by Meaghan all the way at the bottom of the page. The RSS feed shows deleted posts.
I found this comment thread amusing though. http://meaghano.com/post/393246405/tumbledore-ive-run-pitchf...
thats my opinion... taking it away under any circumstance is sketchy in my opinion.
Exactly.