Litigation. An update

First of all, thanks for your comments (and posts on your own sites, Peter, Iain and Sapientum) – they’ve been greatly appreciated. As yet, I’ve yet to hear a response from Wiley’s. (Oh, and I did check the log-files this morning – three visits from wiley.com, so I assume there’s at least a bit of legitimacy to this lot) Personally, I find this entire thing from Wiley’s just hilarious – and I do wonder how far they’re prepared to take it. Peter is completely correct when he says I set up this domain as a pisstake – and yes, it doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to realise that the colour-scheme was based upon an homage to the “for dummies” books. When it first came up as an idea, d4d™ was just one of those silly conversational things – but the idea took off, so I bought the domain. According to the initial plan, it was going to be far more satirical and a full piss-take of the for-dummies series, but that didn’t happen. Instead d4d™ mutated into the warped beast that’s here today.

From day one, there’s always been the disclaimer disavowing itself from Wiley, For Dummies, blah blah. D4D™ never passed itself off as being anything to do with the book series, and that’s the way I see it continuing.

Over at Sapientum, it’s already been said that perhaps I changed the graphics and acquiesced too quickly to their demands. Maybe so. However, I’ve always referred to the site as d4d™, so it’s not that much of a trauma. Besides, I quite like the new pointy man – and the raised middle finger is definitely indicative of Wiley’s attitude to the world. However, the domain name will stay mine ’til Wileys make a decision. In the meantime, I’m also going to sort out a new domain name – suggestions gratefully received, although I think I know what it’ll be *Grin* – so any changeover will happen easily and smoothly. I do feel that as it’s Wileys who are raising this as a problem, that they should be willing to pay for registering a new domain name – that’s a reasonable offer, so I’m absolutely certain they won’t take me up on it.

I don’t yet know how long or hard I’ll fight this – as Peter and GF both say, Wileys have far more resources than I, so the winner of any battle is likely to be a foregone conclusion. However, the attitude that this has been done with so far, the typically litigious American way of “stop using it, or we’ll sue – this is federal law” utterly stinks. If anything could be more calculatedly red-rag to a bull, I don’t know what it is. The fact that the trained monkey-turd lawyer/administrator for Wiley couldn’t even email me (and there’s a contact me page with the email address on) shows how abysmal they really are. As such, I’m not going to take it laying down. I’m looking forward to seeing Kirk Bateman’s response – and also whether he’ll manage to figure out how to reply to an email instead of leaving snotty comments.