The issue became a revealing exercise in Ralph Lauren’s crisis management. In short, it’s an example of how big business should not take on the blogosphere – and raises some important questions about intellectual property in the digital age.
Ralph Lauren issued Photoshop Disasters with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice in protest of its use of the image. The blog’s platform Blogger automatically removed the post. However, the DCMA deals with copyright infringement, and Photoshop Disasters merely used the image to illustrate its point.
On a blog so reliant on visuals, both bloggers and commenters have interpreted this as a challenge to their freedom of speech. It’s a classic David-and-Goliath debate, and the use of DMCA is definitely a dubious defence.
Since then, thanks to blogger solidarity and the assistance of Boing Boing, the saga went viral – making news on the Huffington Post, The Register and ABC. Now the news has broken the UK mainstream media too, including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and the Times.
Photoshop Disasters likens this to the Streisand Effect, the social media equivalent of making a mountain out of a molehill.
So what should Ralph Lauren have done instead? Perhaps it could have explained to the blog how the image came about – whether by accident or by oversight. Or perhaps a pledge to outlaw further dodgy Photoshop work to make women unrealistically skinny might have saved its reputation.
Either way, Ralph Lauren did itself no favours by trying to hide behind DMCA. Shutting down one blog post is simple enough – but taking on the whole blogosphere? You’re going to need a bigger notice.
(In the interests of not getting shut down, the picture is reproduced from Saturday’s Daily Express.)
Comments