For those who haven’t been following it, some guys basically setup a blog called TechCrush to see what happened to sites featured on TechCrunch 6 months down the line (did they fail, have they lived up the hype, yadda yadda).
There’s been some back–and–forth on the blogosphere as to whether Michael Arrington sent ‘nasty C&Ds’ to the TechCrush guys etc.
Micheal has set the record straight (at least from his perspective) by setting out the string of events that have occurred around this issue.
Now look, I’m not one to brown nose people – so don’t think that I am here… but I actually think Michael was right to pursue this for trademark issues. It’s even more honourable that he wrote and said that the guys could run the site ‘if they put a disclaimer on the site stating it wasn’t associate to the TechCrunch site’.
If I had been Michael, I’m not sure whether I would have been so happy or forgiving. Don’t get me wrong, I think the blog is a nice idea (and perhaps a trick Arrington’s missed himself), but it strikes me that these guys could have ‘gone it alone’ with their own identity. The content is note-worthy enough that it doesn’t need to piggy-back it’s namesake.
For me, by taking a swipe at the TechCrunch brand, they’ve actually undermined their otherwise compelling proposition.
I understood that the whole point of TechCrush was to be a counterpoint to TechCrunch, and as such it’s not a question of “taking at swipe at” or “own identity”, but it would actually need that kind of reference to make sense – the down-to-earth look balancing the hype. Otherwise it’d be just fuckedcompany 2.0.
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