Cease & Desist 101: Think Long and Hard Before Hitting Send

The latest Cease & Desist Letter by overzealous legal council.

This is fresh on the heals of a recent discussion at LeadCritic.com regarding Lending Tree’s lame attempt via C & D letters to try to get bloggers to delete comments left by a commenter in posts discussing the Lending Tree Data Leak. The comments listed Lending Tree’s client URL login and claimed it was easy to hack along with basic information indicating he was an ex-exec, nothing to get excited about.

“Cease & desist letters are free traffic” – Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.

This C & D letter is a classic and this letter shows what can happen when issuing a C & D backfires. The moral of the story is that blogs usually have very little to lose by posting your C & D, especially if it has very little merit or is simply a bluff. Your C & D will only cause you embarrassment and boost traffic for the recipient, so think long and hard about what you are trying accomplish before hitting the send button.

UPDATE: As expected the TechCrunch prevails vs Marvel at the cost of $2000 for TechCrunch council. Talk about a waste of resources, Party A pays attorney to send C & D to Party B. Party B pays attorney to respond that there is no grounds for the complaint, Party B backs off and everyone goes back to square one. This could perhaps be slightly less productive then high school cheerleader drama.

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