Adaptive Infinity trying to intimidate a blogger over a comment?

I just learned that John P. (you know, the founder of HTMLHelp.com and a person instrumental to the early development of HTML and CSS) has received a rather intimidating letter from Adaptive Infinity in which they are threatening John with a legal suit over a comment that someone left on his blog while at the same time showing a different, less threatening face, on John’s blog by leaving the following comments. Clearly using his blog for their own PR and marketing purposes and perhaps as a means to perform some kind of amateurish corporate damage control.

The story is that a few years ago John gave VistaPrint.com a try and wasn’t satisfied and blogged about his experience. As a result, in the comments on the blog post, another user posted a link to this article in the Washington Post which details a certain credit card scam. This user also included a link to his own site with what appears to be more factual information and details. Note that it is not VistaPrint.com that has taken these actions towards John P. but Adaptive Infintity, a former partner of VistaPrint.

Situations like these, where corporations, like Adaptive Infinity, with deep pockets make (often idle) threats to intimidate bloggers sharing their experiences are starting to become a dime a dozen. Having a spine and showing a backbone is usually enough to deter them from actually taking their threats anywhere but that, of course, is not always a guarantee. But where would we all be, where would the internet be, if nobody had a spine? Right.

What the legal types at corporations often don’t understand is that once a cat is out of the bag, it’s out there forever. No amount of damage control, filing suits for damage amounts, or any further intimidation tactics is going to lead anywhere. What they also don’t realize is that once something like this happens the story often is no longer about the actual content over which the corporation got upset but rather about the tactics the corporation wishes to deploy in order to perform a form of censorship on the internet. And that, today, has become the new story, on how Adaptive Infinity is sending threatening legal letters to a blogger with a comment on his site. And just what does Adaptive Infinity think it will do when everyone else starts blogging about this? Perhaps their legal team should look into what happened with Scientology and their many legal suits and how all that ended up costing them tons and yielding them nothing.

This is how stories morph on the internet. I would suggest we start calling this Morphy’s Law.

Support John P. and support spines, all throughout the internet!