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It's ironic that the same man who once claimed bloggers were so far beneath him that he would never deign to respond to them now has a blog of his own - a top 10 blog at that, as the ratings of a (now deceased) magazine run by the man's own wife can attest to - and is threatening legal action against one of those very same bloggers that supposedly posed no threat to him. In case you missed it, Rafi put up RapGaydar, a pause-worthy mockery of Elliot Wilson's RapRadar. Wilson then pulled the ultimate blogging snitch move, threatening a Cease and Desist against the site through his twitter account.
Normally internet beef is so corny that it's not worth the effort to bang out even a half assed post on the subject - a recent example being the dust up over the surprisingly controversial declaration that Gucci Mane, who's most significant achievement up to this point has been to smack a woman on camera, can't rap worth a damn - but this is a special case for two reasons. First, we must consider the level of hypocrisy in Wilson's threat. Aside from the fact that his career now seems to be based almost entirely around the very thing which he once so easily dismissed, it's also worth noting that this man was once the Editor-In-Chief of a magazine that repeatedly gave glowing reviews to damn near any album that had an Interscope label on it, with even Tony Yayo receiving an "XL" rating. Given that, does this man actually have a brand worth defending? Is it even possible for this man to be defamed any further than he has already defamed himself? In light of his past dealings with XXL and his use of legal threats to shut down a site that actually offers up some original content, it's hard to believe that he ever got into this whole thing out of any love for the music or the culture, acting as he does now as little more than a leech on what's left of hip hop.
More importantly, however, is the First Amendment issue that this threat raises. When someone with the (apparent) level of influence and connections that Elliot Wilson has suggests that he may pursue legal action against an individual, it has to be taken seriously. As anyone who's received a C&D from a record label can attest to (and if you have a music-based blog of your own, there's a good chance you have), the thought of going up against a team of high priced attorneys can be rather intimidating, no matter how little merit the claim has. And in this case, there is absolutely no merit, as RapGaydar is clearly a parody of RapRadar. The Supreme Court, time and again, has ruled that works of parody are fair use and protected against claims of infringement or libel, and this is most certainly the case here (Fair Use is also the reason I can use the above photo from EW's Twitter account on my site). Yet very few people have the time or the money to go to court and defend their rights, so whenever someone like Wilson is able to successfully use the legal system to bully someone else, it increases the likelihood that such behavior will be visited upon others. Today it's Rafi's RapGaydar, tomorrow it could be your scathing parody of XXL, Smedium. Let Wilson slide on this one, and it's guaranteed he'll be at it again at some point in the future.
Even if the First Amendment argument doesn't mean much to you, you can already read the same stuff and listen to the same major label promos that RapRader posts at a dozen other sites, with the added advantage that the other sites don't stamp a ridiculous watermark over all of the images that they use.
07/02/2009 8:30:01 PM posted by Fresh