How Conde Nasty Strangled a Small Publisher’s Business

It may seem incomprehensible to people who didn’t follow what the Conde Nast vs. Blackmask stuff was all about, but David Moynihan’s piece about how he handled the Doc Savage infringement lawsuit was pretty hilarious (and a little sad) to me.

Excerpts:

Note that, after Black Mask was taken down by Conde’s DMCA notice, enough people were unhappy that I did immediately offer to settle, effectively capitulating and giving them everything they’d want. And that was my intro. But Conde’s attorneys not only rebuffed that measure, they in fact opposed every request I made to gain access to servers with over 20,000 free books (and hundreds of thousands of files), while at the same time swearing they were not intending to harm my business. Had they taken the deal then, they’d probably be a lot happier now, because last May I not only didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Here’s an email exchange talking about how Conde Nast blocked server access to him.

Moynihan was kind of an idiot for not removing the Doc Savage books promptly, but basically Conde Nast just strangled his online projects and his small publishing business in the process.

The lesson to be learned from this is don’t ignore takedown messages; respond to them promptly. Also have a process whereby infringing works can easily be removed from the webserver.