Your post makes some assumptions that aren’t true. Reading the internal discussion, there were missed opportunities on both sides, but Alex’s response was not because of lawyers having too much power, but because we want to have a fair, consisten process. A DMCA notice is a simple and consistent industry standard process for dealing with copyright infringement.

I tend to get quickly upset about copyright infringement and spam, and find many commercial blogs offensive, but I’m thankful that my colleagues have the dispositions to be cautious and give people the benefit of the doubt.

We are very thankfully that you took the time to report this issue, and hope you will report issues to us in the future. Our relationships with people that report issues are very important to us, and with consistent reporting, we quickly gain confidence in those people’s reports.

Thank you!

You can justify running a large business by policy. But my point wasn’t whether or not the policies were justified or not. It was just that their policies raise the bar so high that it becomes more work to stop spammers than it is for them to spam. You can justify requiring someone’s SSN in order to contact you but that doesn’t change the fact that this will make fewer people want to contact you, which was my point.

The secondary point was that when a company gets so big that they have to live by policies, and de-humanize the employees until they sound like robots sending out canned instructions just to comply with the policies without even looking into the issue, even a good company starts to head south.

Our DMCA process at http://automattic.com/dmca
I don’t see how this policy requires unreasonable effort on copyright holders.

What do SSN have to do any of this?

Our small team spends a ton of time and resources dealing with spam, and we can relate to your frustration. Spammers win when we don’t work together.

I don’t care if you don’t get it really though. But just because a company person doesn’t understand how the company looks to the public doesn’t mean it doesn’t look that way.

Unlike you, I don’t have any axe to grind and I don’t have any financial need to see the situation one way or the other. You can pretend that I’m an idiot and being ridiculous if you want, while you’re being impartial. But one of us gets a paycheck from Wordpress and one of us doesn’t. My blog uses WP and I like it. So I’m not saying this to blast you. It’s just the way your policy and the response came across and I felt strongly enough about it to write about it here.

If you want to justify your policy and stick your head in the sand while you act like I’m some hot head being ridiculous you certainly can. But the visitors on my blog/site know that’s not the case and that attitude only insures that you nothing improves or changes.

By the way, your justification of and focus on the policy as well as your denial of any non-company perspective actually helps make my point about de-humanized employees that sound like robots sending out canned instructions. Ironic, huh?

Bill