Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-disappeared-me.html

by petercooper • 15 years ago

133 93 15 years ago

zephoria.org

qq66• 15 years ago

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

zethraeus3• 15 years ago

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

achompas• 15 years ago

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

pero• 15 years ago

Not when I search for 'Zephoria'.

.org (her site) has the first 6 spots; .com (them) has the next 4; and then it's her twitter and flickr accounts.

atacrawl• 15 years ago

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.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

You may have your priorities backwards. An assault on human dignity is far worse than frequent outages, especially for a free service.

larrik2• 15 years ago

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.

turbodog• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Additionally, the post title 'Tumblr disappears [someone]' pretty much implies they're not being sent to the gulag or gitmo, it's just a figure of speech.

kragen3• 15 years ago

"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)

mc324• 15 years ago

It's an inflammatory word whose use is designed to associate with despicable and unpleasant deeds. It's in bad taste to dilute the meaning of the word for personal vanity.

ZoFreX2• 15 years ago

Absolutely agreed. What Tumblr did was rotten, but we live in an age where people are genuinely disappeared on a daily basis, and we've even had posts to HN regarding missing persons. It's very misleading to use the word to mean something different given the amount of proper usage it receives.

jsavimbi2• 15 years ago

Yeah, but, if you're a very important social media researcher who has important information to disseminate to your followers in order to justify your own very importance, then anything short of

"Tumblr disappeared me…"

isn't going to generate the same outrage, and publicity, that Xeni Jardin did when she tried to erase Violet Blue's posts from BoingBoing. "Erase posts" being the conventional and operating phrase. So don't blame her; it's the social media-generated apathy.

bstrand2• 15 years ago

Um, no. 'Disappear' as a transitive verb predates all of that by many decades. E.g.: 1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 "We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron."

See also: lighten up, Francis.

jdp232• 15 years ago

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

zethraeus3• 15 years ago

michaelcampbell2• 15 years ago

And titles are typically capitalized.

petercooper3• 15 years ago

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.

jdp232• 15 years ago

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

quinndupont3• 15 years ago

WOW, that's radical. Next up, she'll add a "/" to her blog name, and we'll all remember that it isn't 1985 any more.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

warfangle• 15 years ago

Username and public URL. That's probably why Zephoria went after it so aggressively.

protomyth• 15 years ago

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.

ditojim2• 15 years ago

it is potentially criminal if they sold it but they are stupid if they didn't? did i read that wrong?

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

Nope, you read that correctly.

To do something that slimy and not get paid for it is stupid. (The fact that it was stupid in the first place does affect the fact that not getting paid for it is stupid in itself.)

cabalamat3• 15 years ago

> If she really was using their name improperly, Tumblr would have been within their rights.

I agree. But she wasn't trying to pass herself off as anyone else, merely use the handle she's been using for over a decade.

> Yanking it out from under her and selling it to someone else is just rude at best, and criminal at worst.

I don't see how it's criminal, though I agree it's rude. I run the MeowCat messaging website (http://meowc.at/ -- it's a cross between Twitter and blogging) and I certainly wouldn't allow a company to take over a user's identity like Tumblr have done.

So if you're reading this Danah, if you want to create Zephoria on MeowCat, I promise I won't give your account to someone else.

getsat• 15 years ago

> I certainly wouldn't allow a company to take over a user's identity like Tumblr have done

Not even for $1000? $5,000? $10,000? We don't know if a favour was done or paid, if any.

dedward• 15 years ago

Was she paying for tumblr service, or was it free? If it as free, there's not much recourse....

AndrewWarner• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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!

msy• 15 years ago

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

teaspoon2• 15 years ago

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

http://bettween.com/davidkarp/zephoria

kmfrk3• 15 years ago

"@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.

sdizdar2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

teaspoon2• 15 years ago

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

elehack• 15 years ago

The really difficult thing is that, while in many cases the demand letters are legitimate and appropriate, in some cases like this they aren't. If Zephoria sued danah for trademark infringement, I would certainly hope they would lose since danah can probably prove that she's been using the pseudonym since 1998, 4 years before their trademark issued.

sdizdar2• 15 years ago

Could it be that Tumblr handles are actually owned by Tumblr, thus it is Tumblr which was "infringing on trademark" and needed to act on Demand Letter? I would love if you or somebody else with more legal knowledge than me (which is not hard :)) can explain this.

chc2• 15 years ago

If their legal department determined this is "valid" (assuming that means she is infringing on the mark, which is the only case in which I could possibly see not contacting her), their legal department must be staffed by baboons.

mikeryan• 15 years ago

From my armchair lawyering understanding, the rule is that Trademark must actively be enforced or you risk diluting the mark.

However its not clear how strictly it must be enforced, unfortunately that means it tends to be enforced more strictly then is absolutely necessary "just in case".

zalew• 15 years ago

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.

mc324• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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?

mc324• 15 years ago

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.

mc324• 15 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but trademark law does not come into the picture here at all. It's a name collision. Resolution of such are generally relegated to site operator.

No one is claiming she's infringing on their trademark, as far as I know.

mmaunder• 15 years ago

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.

ditojim2• 15 years ago

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.

eli2• 15 years ago

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

citadrianne• 15 years ago

Some more context on this: http://www.betabeat.com/2011/04/27/tumblr-gave-danah-boyds-u...

_pius3• 15 years ago

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

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

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

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

quinndupont3• 15 years ago

If you are pretentious, then yes.

kmfrk3• 15 years ago

Of course it is. It's a proper name. Are we going to capitalize the "i"s in Apple products?

I can only assume that's her actual name, as unusual as it is. But a proper name is a proper name.

johncoltrane• 15 years ago

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

js2• 15 years ago

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

rkon• 15 years ago

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...

brendano• 15 years ago

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?

bad_user2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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_user2• 15 years ago

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.

sudonim• 15 years ago

Found the old site in the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c9cda-O...

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

quinndupont3• 15 years ago

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.

m0hit• 15 years ago

I don't matter. But - goodbye tumblr.

shawndrost• 15 years ago

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

kmfrk3• 15 years ago

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-...

gammarator• 15 years ago

update: Tumblr has now restored boyd's account name: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-...

domador• 15 years ago

I've written an article about this particular situation:

http://www.hashcollisions.com/2011/04/a-solomonic-response-t...

Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

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