Circuit City Subpoenas CheapAss Gamer and DVDTalk

An anonymous reader writes "A poster on DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer has posted the weekly ads for Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target ahead of time for the last few years. A few weeks ago he confirmed that there was an intended price break on the PS3 and stole Sony's thunder from E3. A Circuit City ad was used for confirmation. Circuit City has threatened DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer.com to give them personal information about the poster. CheapAssGamer has hired a lawyer and is going to fight. The story is similar to the Black Friday ads being posted early and FatWallet fighting back."

Comments

Re:What's the problem?

[Quila]

The anti-business hippies are out there, anything that screws "tha man" is a Good Thing. I've been maxxed on karma for years, so I'm not too worried.

I also don't think this case is equivalent to the Best Buy case as mentioned in the article. CC is trying to get to the trade secret thief. Best Buy tried to claim copyright on the information posted at Fat Wallet and sent a DMCA takedown notice to the web site itself. The problem is you can't copyright information (see the Feist decision), so the Best Buy's actions were fraudulent.

Re:What's the problem?

[InsaneGeek]

So in your opinion it's better to lay off a bunch of innocent people than to request the log files from a website? It's better for a bunch of people with family's to get laid off, possibly lose their house, car, etc than it is to request the log files from a website... glad you aren't in charge of the world.

And just so you know, a subpoena is a LEGAL court order to turn over records, which is completely different than suing.

Re:What's the problem?

[Puff of Logic]

Seems to me some moderators need to reread (if they read at all) the moderators guide and mod to promote instead of demote. I'll apologise right now for being offtopic in this thread, but I thought this merited a reply. I tend to get mod points about once a week or so, and do my best to moderate fairly and judiciously. In fact, I can only recall modding a post "flamebait" once, and that post thoroughly deserved the mod. That said, I also try to maintain a 1:1 relationship between moderating and meta-moderating sessions, as the system must be self-correcting for poor mods. For you, and those like you who believe that the moderation system is periodically abused, please take the time to meta-moderate and give some feedback. Sure, for all I know the feedback goes straight into Slashdot's /dev/null but I figure trying to provide some oversight to the mod system beats just complaining about it.

cheers.