"Ass Tee" crackdown update!

*Update* 30 August 2005
Got news back from my friend. After trying to reach them twice by email over a week, "Ass Tee" finally responded. They said that as an act of goodwill, if the company would pay for the articles (coupla thousands), "Ass Tee" will waive the $640 investigative charges. Also, if the company pay for the articles, they will get to use it on their site for ... 1 WHOLE YEAR!! WOW! ... how generous *cough* cough* ... Ok, now to be fair to "Ass Tee", they do have a right to do what they are doing. But in my own humble opinion, they are just being an absolute Ass in the way they are handling it. It is prevalent (lemme re-emphasize that with a capital "Pee"), repeat PREVALENT, that companies, restaurant etc uses newspaper clipping, articles etc in their course of business. Examples like insurance agents showing you their portfolio of "newspaper industry reports", and restaurants like NYDC with clippings framed up in their restaurants for "publicity". If these actions are infringing in the copyright act, then by all means, for god sake, send out a freaking WARNING!! You get warnings on piracy everywhere, cos it is prevalent. If this act of clipping newspaper to put on a company website is illegal, freaking warn us about it!! Why am I so bothered by this again? I run a freaking restaurant, and after i heard about this incident, I removed all the "references" to articles which wrote about us for fear of offending the "Almighty Ass Tee" from my website! Please .. if "AssTee" is on a crackdown, they should let businesses know what is illegal before slapping a fine!!

For people who runs businesses and have a website and you quote from newspaper articles or place clippings of articles that talk about you or your company, you have been warned!!

For Original article, click here!