A quick note on this since some of the people reading this blog are avid readers. If you're using shelfari.com or thinking about it, read these:
Shelfari looks like a Quechup copycat. Remember this simple rule: If a website asks you for a third-party password, run for your life.
Thanks to Paul Bristow for calling attention to this. By the way, I use and love LibraryThing.
News articles have been appearing with a response to charges that Prince's representatives are legally harassing fan sites. According to a statement by AEG:
Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalise fans and nor is he looking to or inhibiting freedom of speech in any way. In fact, he is simply looking to provide Prince fans with exclusive music and images entirely free of charge, and bypassing unofficial and unauthorised phoney fan sites that exploit both consumers and artists.
I'm getting a little skeptical of what's going on, as no one has quoted the actual cease and desist notice which was allegedly sent out on Prince's behalf. This is the kind of information that princefansunited.com should be providing but isn't. Without a direct quotation of what was demanded, it's impossible to pass definitive judgment. Perhaps Prince's lawyers declared that the letter was copyrighted and must not be published? I also have to wonder why princefams.com, one of the three major sites reporting the harassment, is registered in China when it has no Chinese content, and why the domain name (note the "m") looks like the kind designed to exploit typographical errors.
The letters allegedly demand that the sites remove all images bearing his likeness. It this is true, he's acting without a shadow of a legal ground. The letters haven't been quoted verbatim anywhere I can find, but neither has Prince or AEG denied making that demand. I'm provisionally assuming the demand is real, which puts Prince in a very bad light. The reference to "unofficial and unauthorised phoney fan sites" suggests that Prince wants to replace actual fans with "official" and "authorized" fans. Stepford fans.
But there may still be more to the story.
I've been gradually realizing that on the Internet, there's a small but very active core of people who are very enthusiastic about supporting Ron Paul, but really haven't a clue about how to present their case effectively. Take a look at the comments on this post on the Technology Liberation Front blog. Normally posts there get a handful of comments at most. But when Tim Lee suggested that comment flooding is a poor strategy, the same comment flooders descended on his post. The attitudes there range from the ridiculous to the paranoid. Lee has criticized their flaming, therefore he is an enemy and must be flamed.
Things have gotten nastier since an unknown party used a botnet to send out spam supporting Paul. It's possible that someone supporting him did this; it could also have been a dirty trick to discredit Paul's campaign. Nuts can appear in any organization. The intelligent thing for Paul's supporters to do is to denounce whoever did it and affirm that they don't spam. But Thomas DiLorenzo, on lewrockwell.com, wrote a bizarre post asserting that ""Wired" has been exposed as lying about non-existent Ron Paul-supporting spammers." There's nothing about what the lies were, or how they were exposed. Too many others are following a similar line, trying to pin the spam on the NSA or deny it entirely rather than conveying sane indignation.
These are people who don't understand the promotion of libertarian principles, only the short-sighted promotion of a candidate. (DiLorenzo is in a different category, being chronically irresponsible rather than innocently ignorant, but the effect is the same.) Ron Paul's
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