This Makes Me Sad.

I am a big fan of Jason Kottke’s kottke.org. He runs a site that looks great and is chock full of interesting links and commentary. Jason, like a lot of us, has been really into the amazing run that Ken Jennings has had on Jeopardy this year. He even wrote this funny short essay about him. We all knew that K-Jen would have to lose at some point and when word got out that it had happened, kottke.org had a spolier-free (unless you wanted to know) update. The show where K-Jen lost aired on Tuesday, November 30th. On the 28th kottke.org posted an audio link of the Final Jeopardy where K-Jen lost. Sony leaned on him and asked him to pull the audio clip. Hey, it happens, so he pulled the audio file. Then they got on him about the transcript of the audio clip that he had posted. Seems excessive to me but it’s their property so I guess they have say as to what happens with it.

What bums me out is that Jason K. was pretty rattled by the idea of getting sued by Sony so he posted this today:

“Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world. One of the reasons for the silence is that my legal difficulties with Sony about the whole Ken Jennings thing have yet to be resolved. I can’t say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org. As an individual weblogger with relatively limited financial and legal resources, I worry about whether I can continue to post things (legal or not) that may upset large companies and result in lawsuits that they can afford and I cannot. The NY Times can risk upsetting large companies in the course of their journalistic duties because they are a large company themselves, they know their rights, and they have a dedicated legal team to deal with stuff like this. In the current legal climate, it may be that the whole “are blogs journalism?” debate is moot until bloggers have access to a level of legal resources similar to what large companies have. I’m certainly thinking very seriously about whether I can keep this site going in this kind of environment.”

I think it would be a shame if the internet lost a voice as articulate and interesting as Jason Kottke’s.