Naming-and-shaming on Slashdot: better than hiring a lawyer

This is wild. ZiffDavis/EWeek sent a threatening letter to pocketpctools.com for quoting one of their articles with a link back to the EWeek site. About two hours later, on a Sunday night, a ZD/EW rep had managed to get the entire action abandoned and written a letter of retraction that Slashdot published. That's pretty amazing: I think that even the highest-priced attorney in the land would be hard pressed to get that kind of action in that timeframe.

"Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:

"While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!

"We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.

"My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly."

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