

Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd - petercooper
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-disappeared-me.html

======
wccrawford
It's sad to me that companies get priority for names, even when people have
had the names for years before the company existed.

If she really was using their name improperly, Tumblr would have been within
their rights... But they STILL should have contacted her first and let her try
to explain. Yanking it out from under her and selling it to someone else is
just rude at best, and criminal at worst. (I'm assuming they sold it... If
they didn't, they're dumber than I think. This kind of BS isn't worth it
unless they get something from it.)

~~~
jaysonelliot
I've been mired in the vagaries of trademark law for a few weeks now, and
based on my limited knowledge, there is no legal reason that a company with
the trademark Zephoria would be able to prevent her from also using that name,
if she were able to show that she had used it since 1998.

Part of obtaining a trademark is doing due diligence and finding out how the
name is being used in public. That includes use that isn't trademarked, but is
publicly visible.

This is a different matter, since it's about a username on a private service,
but the principle still holds. Danah has no legal recourse in this instance,
but it does show that Tumblr is acting hastily and, in my view, improperly, by
just yanking her account away from her without notice, appeal, or recourse.

~~~
protomyth
Also, isn't trademark restricted to an "area"? I would think it wouldn't be
out of the realm of possibilities for two companies to want the same username
with trademark claims to back both.

~~~
petercooper
Yes, but then it'd be a deliberation between two holders rather than one
holder and a non-holder.

I'm surprised there aren't many famous 'double' trademarks. The only one that
springs to mind is _Jif_ , the lemon juice, and _Jif_ , the kitchen cleaner
which were both household names in the UK. The kitchen cleaner renamed to
_Cif_ as part of a global brand realignment, though.

~~~
dpritchett
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer>

~~~
petercooper
Good call, sir! I'm expecting a torrent of replies now with obvious examples
I'd forgotten about(!) :-)

------
qq66
Seems pretty dumb for a "social media consulting company" to get on the bad
side of a social media poster child.

~~~
zethraeus
I'm really surprised they've managed to beat her in google ranking.

~~~
achompas
Why? They're a social media consultancy. They must be familiar with SEO.

~~~
zethraeus
because she _really_ has content and they are relative nobodies. maybe i'm
just not cynical enough when it comes to the effectiveness of SEO.

------
AndrewWarner
Another reminder that we should all just get our own domains.

Using a subdomain of another company is always risky and it's bad branding.

~~~
Raphael
In fact, Tumblr lets you use your own domain. She could use
tumblr.zephoria.org and Zephoria Inc. could use tumblr.zephoria.com. Everyone
wins!

------
turbodog
Um, no. These people were disappeared:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rettig_Report>

Apparently her blog was only moved. Inconvenient, yes. Gross human rights
violation, no. See also: comparing yourself to Rosa Parks.

~~~
wewyor
I don't see any reason to fret over a word, it was never compared to human
rights violation in the post and in the context they did _disappear_ her from
her chosen handle on the site which is just as much as removing her blog as it
isn't linked to the other in any other way.

~~~
kragen
"Disappear" (transitive) is absolutely a reference to a human-rights
violation. See <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disappear>:

disappear (ˌdɪsəˈpɪə)

— vb

1\. ( intr ) to cease to be visible; vanish

2\. ( intr ) to go away or become lost, esp secretly or without explanation

3\. ( intr ) to cease to exist, have effect, or be known; become extinct or
lost: the pain has disappeared

4\. ( tr ) (esp in South and Central America) to arrest secretly and
presumably imprison or kill (a member of an opposing political group)

~~~
ajross
In the fourth of four variants, where _all three_ of the earlier ones seem to
apply well here. Language is language. Causes and issues, no matter how grave,
don't get to own bits of it.

~~~
chc
None of the first three apply here. They are all clearly marked as
intransitive ("The train disappeared into the night") rather than transitive
("Tumblr disappeared her").

------
teaspoon
There's an ongoing Twitter thread between danah and David Karp:

<http://bettween.com/davidkarp/zephoria>

~~~
kmfrk
"@davidkarp I wrote back to your team & CCed you. What I want is my acct name
back. I'd be happy to help you improve your notifying processes"

That's the best combination of kindness and passive aggressiveness I've seen
in years.

------
mc32
While I can feel some sympathy, I can't feel outrage.

It's not outrageous. They did not delete the content -they moved it (at first
she complained about losing her data, then retrenched to complaining about
broken links -so what was the real problem? She does not own the URL, the site
operator does. She made assumptions which proved untrue. The result of such is
unfortunate and inconvenient.

It's worthy of a rant of displeasure with how they reach name collision
resolution -but it's hardly an affront to the person.

That is to question the "disappeared me" harking to military summary
executions of actual physical people? (not online handle). If anything, that's
an outrage in itself. A delusion(?) of importance.

I think it's basically a problem of disconnect in expectations.

TL;DR. My data was deleted -I'm upset. Oh, wait, it wasn't; It was moved. I'm
pissed anyway.

~~~
msravi
So if gmail or yahoo or hotmail or whatever, suddenly decided that your
username is trademarked and "moved" your email, without notifying you or
giving you a chance to contest the trademark infringement, you'd be ok with
it? You'd sympathize with yourself but wouldn't be outraged with their
actions?

~~~
mc32
I could only expect what they outline in their TOSes.

However, that said, mail is different in that mixing signals (email intended
for me going into a mailbox now under control of someone else) might leave
them open to liability, depending on what kind of information could be
compromised). So, I don't think that would be a valid comparison.

Look, her basic argument was her data (content) was lost, then, learning it
wasn't, revised the complaint to, my links are broken. That's moving the
goalpost. That was my main point.

------
atacrawl
The sad part of this is that it won't matter in the least. If frequent outages
don't keep people away, this certainly won't.

~~~
larrik
I don't know about that. Outages don't really hurt your "cool factor" so much,
whereas bending over for corporations (and thereby looking corporate yourself)
really does.

------
sdizdar
I understand frustration but Zephoria is trademarked from 2002.
<http://www.trademarkia.com/zephoria-78132833.html>

So my question is following: when trademark should be enforced and when not?
If a company X is an internet consulting company and somebody has a blog
talking about internet using the same name, is that trademark infringement?
Does Tumblr (or any blog operator) need to contact user to explain if they get
Demand Letter from lawyer representing the trademark owner and Tumblr's legal
department determines it is valid?

I'm not trying to defend anybody but just want to understand how trademark can
be enforced.

~~~
TillE
Trademarks are inherently limited in scope. If I'm making widgets named FOO,
and I've registered that trademark, I have no inherent right to FOO.com or
@FOO or anything else that's completely general and may have nothing to do
with widgets.

<http://www.chillingeffects.org/domain/faq.cgi>

> Of course, you aren?t expected to look up trademark registrations around the
> world or research legal issues like common law trademark rights. That?s why
> the Policy requires the trademark owner (the complainant) to prove bad faith
> and why the Policy offers domain name holders the opportunity to demonstrate
> that they have rights or legitimate interests in the domain name.

~~~
teaspoon
That's true regarding _infringement_ , but trademark _dilution_ can apply to
uses that aren't in competition with or relevant to the trademark holder.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trademark_Dilution_Act>

------
msy
Another case of "if you're not paying for it, don't expect shit"

------
johncoltrane
If I remember well, there has been at least one precedent involving a music
publication called pitchfork. Like two years ago. Tumblr just seized the URL
and I think the matter was histerically handled by a crazy girl at Tumblr.

Here, in France we had a David Vs Goliath situation years ago: an old woman
called Milka who had a microscopic sewing/retouching business had to fight
Milka/Kraft's bigwig lawyers for her milka.fr domain name.
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milka_contre_Kraft_Foods>

------
shawndrost
Tumblr renames almost-dead [0] account after notifying user [1] and not
hearing back. When she complains, they give it back [0]. What assholes.

Can I flag this? I'm flagging this.

[0] Last post Jan 21; 5 posts since Sept '10. <http://zephoria.tumblr.com/>
[1] <http://twitter.com/#!/davidkarp/status/63313370283122688>

~~~
kmfrk
They e-mailed her on Passover and gave her 72 hours to reply[1].

Assholes in my book.

[1]:
[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-
disappeared-me.html)

------
mmaunder
Welcome to The Cloud. We have an internal policy that determines what is OK to
store in the cloud and what we store on internal servers. e.g. sensitive
strategic docs don't get put on Google Docs. All customer service emails stay
on internal servers and aren't outsourced to cloud providers. Our mission
critical servers are our own hardware, but we use cloud providers for non-
critical services.

~~~
ditojim
are you up more than gmail? if so, what does it cost you to meet or beat their
uptime? also, in the case of google docs, you own your data, not google.

~~~
eli
Sure, assuming everything is working properly. What happens if Google decides
to lock you out of your account?

~~~
pyre
But... but.. but.. Google would only do that if you did something obviously
wrong, so that makes it ok.

~~~
eli
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g8c3s/i_uploaded...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g8c3s/i_uploaded_nudes_to_a_private_locked_picasa_album/)

------
brendano
The question of historical precedent is interesting. In her post she says
she's been using "zephoria" personally since 1998; Wayback Machine shows a
zephoria.org landing page in 2002 and a full website in 2003. And she had a
public profile even back then (There was an NYT article ... wow, in 2003).

The trademark apparently was from 2002, but hypothetically, had it been a few
years later, would having the same name as the handle and personal domain of a
(mildly) well-known person be relevant for a decision to grant a trademark?

------
zalew
It's a lame move from both tumblr and the company zephoria. Here I'd like to
ask if anoyone heard of twitter stealing one's username? I was once very
surprised finding that <http://twitter.com/#!/bmw> is used by some guy, while
the company uses other twitter accounts
<http://twitter.com/#!/search/users/bmw> and I wonder if they even tried to
get the username.

------
sudonim
Found the old site in the google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c9cda-O...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c9cda-O7YsMJ:zephoria.tumblr.com/+zephoria&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

Last post was in January, but she wasn't squatting by any means.

------
domador
I've written an article about this particular situation:

[http://www.hashcollisions.com/2011/04/a-solomonic-
response-t...](http://www.hashcollisions.com/2011/04/a-solomonic-response-to-
username-disputes/)

------
citadrianne
Some more context on this: [http://www.betabeat.com/2011/04/27/tumblr-gave-
danah-boyds-u...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/04/27/tumblr-gave-danah-boyds-
username-to-a-marketing-company/)

------
jdp23
Title fix: she spells her name danah Boyd (lower-case letters)

~~~
petercooper
Thanks for letting me know but I'm not planning to change it - though a
moderator is welcome to, if they're reading this.

There's no semantic difference between upper and lower case in a proper name
and I suspect more people would complain I'd typoed or got the name wrong if I
corrected it to the "right" version. It's like transliterating the French "é"
to a US English "e"; technically erroneous, but a better fit for Anglophones.

~~~
jdp23
True, there's no semantic difference between spelling somebody's name
correctly and incorrectly. It's "just" a matter of respect.

------
_pius
Peter, could you fix the headline? Her name is lower case.

<http://www.danah.org/name.html>

~~~
nitrogen
If The Headline Is In Title Case, is it still appropriate to use lowercase
letters for her name?

~~~
quinndupont
If you are pretentious, then yes.

~~~
_pius
It's her name ... she gets to decide how it's spelled.

~~~
nitrogen
Naturally. I'm just wondering if there's a convention for capitalization of
lower-case names in a location (such as a title) where any other word would
have been capitalized.

~~~
_pius
I'm curious too actually ... my response wasn't criticizing your question.

------
gammarator
update: Tumblr has now restored boyd's account name:
[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-
disappeared-me.html)

------
m0hit
I don't matter. But - goodbye tumblr.

------
rkon
Did this marketing company forget what happened to Cook's Source when they
screwed with the little people? The internet doesn't respond kindly to that
type of bullying:

[http://techland.time.com/2010/11/17/cooks-source-magazine-
co...](http://techland.time.com/2010/11/17/cooks-source-magazine-controversy-
episode-3-the-editor-strikes-back/)

------
js2
"Change your blogs name. Not that big of a deal."

------
quinndupont
Good riddance. Her vacuous posts, a step above a "social ninja/guru" need not
tarnish the fact that she somehow managed to get a PhD, by making the
revelation that Myspace is old, Facebook is new.

------
bad_user
If you want a blog -- just buy your own domain, use a service that you can
replicate yourself in case you need to (e.g. Wordpress or plain HTML, using a
plain web server -- GitHub Pages is free of charge ;)) ; and do monthly
backups of everything (the storage of an entire blog on S3, Dropbox, or heck,
GitHub, is cheap).

Personally I'm using GitHub pages, on my own domain, using a commenting system
simpler than Disqus, but that I'm hosting on a free GAE account. Wordpress
with regular dumps is also appropriate.

My blog is not popular, but I like feeling in control. I'm surprised that
people haven't seen this coming with services like Tumblr.

~~~
wdewind
S3 could do the exact same thing tumblr just did (though for different
reasons, granted). This is the risk of the cloud in general (or really of
outsourcing ANY labor in general) and is not isolated to tumblr etc. More a
question of where you draw the line in terms of price/risk.

~~~
bad_user
The problem is that Tumblr is a freemium, and most users are not Tumblr's
customers, but rather their product.

By using S3, you are Amazon's customer. And my whole point is not that _you
should host it yourself_ , but rather that you should use services which makes
it easy for you to migrate, in case shit happens.

Setting up a Wordpress blog is trivial, lots of alternative providers other
than Wordpress.com are available, doing backups from time to time is also
trivial, and if you own your own domain, restoring your blog can be done in
only a couple of hours tops.

The only reason to use something like Tumblr (IMHO) is the ease of setup (that
becomes painful once you want to customize), and the social aspects of it --
but nothing stops you from automatically sending all your links to be posted
under your Facebook/Twitter account; and you can give users the option to
comment under their Facebook/Twitter ID -- as long as you keep the comments /
the articles / the domain, I don't see a problem there.

~~~
r00fus
I think there's a place where "freemium" is the right fit... if you have non-
essential content, or don't spend much time or effort on your web properties,
it's probably an ok thing.

Once you have anything worth backing up/restoring, you should start _paying_
for what you use, because being a customer means something
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1684732> ... "If you're not paying,
you're the product").

There are those who can't pay, and for that reason I do think it's good to
fight this kind of blatant identity-theft.

Still a lesson: If you can afford it and if you have anything of worth on
someone else's servers, you should be paying for that privilege.

