I was just reading a story on BGR that they picked up from Techdirt that they picked up from BroadbandReports.com about a ridiculous policy that Cingular has when it comes to sites linking to their site.
“Links to the Sites. You are granted a limited, nonexclusive right to create a hypertext link to the homepage of the Sites, provided such link does not portray Cingular Wireless or any of its products and services in a false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise defamatory manner. You may not use a Cingular or Cingular Wireless logo or other proprietary graphic or trademark of Cingular or Cingular Wireless to link to the Sites without the express written permission of Cingular Wireless. This limited right may be revoked at any time.”
How stupid is that? Cingular, now AT&T, is basically saying that you cannot link to them unless you have something nice to say.
I am dead set against anyone making false accusations, allegations, representations, and everything else that is simply not true about a person or company, however, what right does AT&T, or any company for that matter (Verizon), have to tell me the guidelines to which I link to them under so long as I am not telling a lie?
According to this policy I cannot link to AT&T’s site with TRUE statements like:
- Cingular, in my opinion, is, by far, the worst cell phone company that I have ever used.
- Cingular says they have the fewest dropped calls. The problem for me is that they never have a strong enough signal for me to make a call in the first place.
- Cingular’s customer service is almost as bad as Sprint’s, from my experience.
I have been pretty critical of Cingular in the past but haven’t received any letters from their lawyers telling me to stop linking to them. Maybe they only care if you have millions of readers per month as compared to just hundreds of thousands.
The big question is, if you get one of those cease and desist letters after writing this post, would you have the ballz to keep it up, or would you take it down.
Cingular would have a case on the modification of the their logo but they would not win a suite on the basis of the content if the modified logo were removed. The author of this post was very careful in the wording of the links redirecting to Cingular’s home page as it is clear that these are his opinions and not statements of fact.
He didn’t link the logo so would he even have to worry about that?
” . . . pretty critical of Cingular in the passed . . .”
I think you mean “pretty critical of Cingular in the past” . . .
yep, that’s what i meant…