fine, i'm so about the cease and desist... that is, cease and desist buying from BestBuy. dont mess with my kotaku baby!! now you got yourselves a one man boycott in Puerto Rico where you conviently have no stores, but oh no!! this doesnt end here baby!! the fight must go on! i will not let heavy handed legal action stop my kotaku from givin me the dirt on people... copyright my ass you clownmonkies!!

can you imagine a world without lawyers? (inser video of happy people from all the races of the world enjoying a big picnic with no troubles at all here) one can dream :P

Are you kidding? Best Buy stinks and I don't like them.

I appreciate that it's expensive and not very fun to fight this sort of thing, but at the same time, somebody ought to. It's a matter of precedent - if every company can claim that you can't print what you know about them because it's copyrighted, you'll never be able to print anything except what you get from the horse's...mouth. As for the lawyers themselves, isn't there a deeper flaw in their reasoning? I looked over the stories (which are still on your server somewhere, I think, because I only needed to google them to see them) and I didn't see any actual copyrighted (-able) material in the stories. There were facts, but as far as I could tell, no actual full quotations from the document which could even be subject to a copyright claim. So where's the violation? And that's not even getting in to the 'fair use' issue.

braulio, I'll join in with your boycott of Best Buy... All the way from the UK, heh. Big corporations facing down onto small groups such as Gawker is rather horrible really. Oh, and I put this on Digg.com, hope no-one minds. http://digg.com/gaming/Kotaku_threatened_with_legal_action... Anything to do with legality and gaming usually gets noticed there, heh.

what happend to the freedom of the press? and i do not see any copyright text on those documents.

Seems that they can't handle the truth. There's nohing wrong with Kotaku, the only thing they did, was telling the truth!

is it messed up? yes it is =). Unfortunetly this thing happens all the time. Even when there is potential benifit. I work for a price comparison search engine and we constantly get manufacturers telling us that they want us to cease and desist using thier pictures to help sell thier product. Ok.... I know why they do it on the basic layer they want to protect thier photos but come on. It's like they can't see the bigger picture. This reminds me of how Sears got the black friday site to remove thier black friday ads or when frys killed the frysads website which was retarded since Frys didn't even have thier own website at the time. But coming from Best Buy this kind of action is to be expected. Especially since they hate devil customers so much. Oh yeah on a side note not all manuf or stores are incredibly anal :)

Ummm... just make a table of the data, and don't post the scanned pics. You can't copyright information, unless it is organized in a special way (in this case I think it was in numerical order, so that's not considered special by courts).

I think it really isn't worth kotaku's time to do that lol....

So best buy is taking its time to threaten legal action against kotaku for doing what it does best (dispensing gaming and related info), but they can't do diddly about my computer that I haven't had since the middle of July? Smooth.

I'm sure this won't be a popular point, but regardless of the lawyer's professionalism or knowledge of the site/gaming, they did get you to remove the content from your website and utlimately achieved what they were hired to do. If you really felt their point without merit and wanted to argue about journalistic integrity and the right to post this infomration, you should have continued to display it. Otherwise, you're taking the "easy road" and encouraging the behavior/actions of Best Buy that you appear to find distasteful. Just my .02....Flame on. (Not a lawyer nor do I think fondly of lawyers. Actually the opposite and think free speech fights are worth fighting passionately, not passively.)

Screw you Best Buy. I'm not buying my system from you because you turn it into more of a circux than Bill's alreaday made it. They're on their way out anyways...they're not turning as big a profit as they were!

Additional thought (beyond my horrible spelling): At the least I hope you refrain from posting anything that helps to promote Best Buy in the future, or if you do you include information regarding this "threat of legal action" so that they aren't getting any free (positive) publicity to your readers.

Even though I read all of the posts that have been deleted, I'm sure mirrors will come sometime today.

Right on Night Owl...no promotions for them...We're loyal readers anyways. Makes me glad I went to Circuit City for my last monitor instead of Best Buy. (Cheaper too lol)

Don't boycott Best Buy. Just become a "demon customer" - Google it. Only buy stuff on sale that they lose money on selling to you. Buy something, file for the rebate, and then take it back. Never, EVER buy the extended warranties. Go ahead and shop there, but make them lose money to sell stuff to you.

Just thought I would add, the story was promoted to the front page on Digg.com. Yays.

yep, free press for kotaku!

NightOwl you give a very idealistic and good point. However in real life legal battles are not cheap and ultimately for Kotaku to go around making enemies of retailers (like potential Sponsors) is not a very smart decision. Principles are good and all but sometimes in reality it's best to find a reasonable compromise. I think it was a wise decision for kotaku to remove the articles for the importance of the articles themselves.

Zoglog, Absolutely, from a business point of view I agree. However I think the tone of this article was trying to take some "journalistic integrity" type of high ground and yet when push came to shove, they buckled under the same pressure (ala business decisions) that generate the type of thinking that Best Buy had to begin with. I don't fault Kotaku for their decision so much as the attempt to try to have their cake and eat it to by complaining about what Best Buy was doing and then submitting to it all in one move. Ultumately though, I read this site for the great gaming news, not necessarily lessons in ethics or reasons related to "journalistic integrity" so my perception of Kotaku in that context is unchanged, its great. The decision to buckle was not unwise, but the decision to complain about it and try to (again, this is my perception) take some "high ground" type of stance just struck me as disingenuous. Peace

NightOwl, amen. This incident just made my decision on where to cover the 360 launch in my community, tho. Press solidarity, brothers...or something.

HAHA and im glad i am reading this. One year on we win!