Send cease-and-desist letter first, ask questions later

By Eriq Gardner

When a record company finds out that one of its bands has posted copyrighted material on a website, what does it do?

If Warner Music Group is the label, it apparently sends its own band a cease-and-desist letter. Or maybe someone in legal affairs just made a phone call. Nevertheless, when Death Cab for Cutie learned their label wasn't happy, they left fans a note at the band's website (pictured above) that read, "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG."

After suffering a bit of heckling on social news site Reddit, the band then pulled the entire embedded video.

Nobody seems to be interested in good publicity these days. Copyright protectors rule the nest.

Take GateHouse Media as another example. 

The company wasn't pleased to learn that a New York Times subsidiary, boston.com, was featuring links in an RSS feed to a GateHouse-owned local blog. These links connected users directly to GateHouse's website but GateHouse didn't appreciate the traffic. Last December, GateHouse sued NYT for copyright infringement in a case watched by some legal observers as perhaps shedding light on the legality of a practice known as "RSS Scraping."

Everyone will need to wait for another case on the topic. Yesterday, the NYT announced the parties had settled the case. In the settlement agreement (here), the NYT agreed to remove the links.