Tumblr Stole My Domain At The Behest of A Corporation
I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com. Where my blog once stood now stands the official Tumblr for Pitchfork Media Inc. Watch out, Soup, I hear Campbell’s is gunning for you next.
Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting. That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc.
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I think I’ve said this before, but everyone who posts here should internalize it: you have very little control (legally) over what you post here. Check out the Terms of Service - you own your own content, but Tumblr has a very broad license to do whatever it wants with the content, including moving or deleting it. I can’t fault them for the language because they need broad rights to run the site in the first place, but it’s also not something that I think most users are aware of or have internalized.
Given that you have so little control over the content you post, you have even LESS control over the URL you select. [WHATEVER].tumblr.com is a Tumblr subdomain, so they can do whatever they want with the URLs, whenever they want. They need this power too, because they need to be able to reserve URLs for “major” content providers and people who will eventually drive revenue.
Now all of that is pretty legalistic, isn’t it? And we don’t really care about all that. Tumblr’s big sin here was being completely silent about what it was doing and not communicating with the user before pulling the switcheroo. This is the kind of hybrid legal/outreach problem that you’d expect Tumblr to get right given how many “community” people they’ve hired, but once again they haven’t. An in-house counsel with dual legal/business responsibilities would be the perfect person for dealing with these issues (like Gaby Darbyshire at Gawker).
Yes, that discrepancy about 10 minutes versus 72 hours is huge.
Now, moving on, though this is more amusing than Matt Mullenwag carrying some personal vendetta onto my WordPress.com blog’s comments..
