RSSThe Swatch Thickens
January 29th, 2006 | View Comments
Background info: Stitch THIS!, Stitch Revisited and Revenge of the Stitch
Voldemort the sewing company posted an open letter to the members of the sewing, knitting, and crochet community, in which they attempt to gain people’s favor by writing poorly and defaming Debbie Stoller. Details are available at girl from auntie.
Let’s just say that any doubts I had about their “marketing” “manager” being a complete hack are pretty much erased at this point, since I’m pretty sure that Using Spellcheck is covered on Day 1 of business school and Not Posting Un-Proofread, Potentially Libelous Rants About Your Legal Adversaries is covered on Day 2.
My guess is that their lawyers will advise them to take it down as soon as they get wind of it so they don’t risk getting slapped with a libel suit along with the petition for trademark cancellation.
In addition, a number of prominent knit bloggers, including the webmistress of Free to Stitch, Free to Bitch have been receiving anonymous emails and comment spam that range on the scale from annoying to vaguely threatening. The recipients of the emails have traced the IPs to Verizon subnets serving New York City, which is of course where Voldemort sewing company is located.
This all comes on the heels of the news that the parties are in settlement negotiations. Explanations and some analysis also available at girl from auntie.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Added Jan. 30: The original letter was re-posted with some spelling corrections and then removed entirely. However, I and at least several dozen others took screenshots of it when it first went up, so unless they fire the marketing manager shortly, it will be hard for Voldemort to retain plausible deniability on this one.
In its place is an announcement on their message board, stating that they reserve the right to remove “slanderous and nasty comments” and that, “There is no place on this forum for this type of negative slander.”
Never mind that a) it’s libel, not slander, and b) “negative slander” is redundant as there is no such thing as positive slander.
The best part of it is something that the very astute girl from auntie pointed out.
No deliberate direction to advertising of any Stitch and Bitch books will be allowed. There is much to be found on knitting in many other books published
Given that the root of this kerfuffle is their belief that they have exclusive rights to use the phrase “Stitch and Bitch” on commercial sewing and knitting books (among other things), this is a very curious thing to say, no?
The other thing that I’ve been thinking with regard to this situation is that Voldemort is very, very lucky that knitters are generally not known for technical savvy or ruthless ire.
Because when you think about what happened when the Kaycee Nicole scandal erupted on Metafilter and other forums, you realize it took internet users a mere two days to track down the identity and location of the real girl whose likeness was used for the false Kaycee Nicole and the perpetrator’s home address and phone number. After that, they almost literally ran the woman out of town with angry emails, letters, and phone calls.
Added Feb. 3 The administrator of Craftster has received a letter from Voldemort demanding that the two forum threads devoted to discussing the trademark fiasco be deleted, on the grounds that they are “slander”. She will be removing the threads accordingly, a position that I understand.
However, it seems to me that the letter was not sent from a lawyer because again they have confused slander with libel–too elementary a mistake to have been made by someone who’s passed the bar exam. This suggests to me that the letter is primarily a scare tactic and not something that necessarily reflects real legal standing.
It also strikes me as more than a bit hypocritical that they posted and publicized a clearly libelous statement (and did not publish a retraction after they removed said statement), but apparently cannot stand a dozen or so people calmly discussing their business practices. It appears that Voldemort can dish it, but can’t take it.
Yvonne posted this on January 29th, 2006 @ 12:34pm in Stitch & Bitch | Permalink to "The Swatch Thickens"
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