Republican bloggers launch campaign of harassment in Virginia

Read more after the jump.
The worst offender in this regard is an attorney named John Maxfield.  Mr. Maxfield's blogger profile identifies him as an attorney "practicing for just over 2 years in a growing corporate and capital market firm." He is a graduate of George Mason University's Law School.

Quite early in this dispute, Mr. Maxfield took the offending Republican blogger on as his "client."  Since then, Mr. Maxfield has published a series of posts in which he employs the conceit of a court room trial in which he turns the tables on Mr. Jaquith.  Mr. Maxfield has argued strenuously that Mr. Jaquith was wrong to remove the offending blog from the "VPB" aggregator.

In his latest post, Mr. Maxfield takes his conceit several steps further and actually offers all of us some legal advice:

Boycott Waldo and everyone move over to BNN . . . By doing so, you as a blogger will see your true number of readership, rather than having Waldo GÇ£steal your intellectual property.GÇ¥ Remember, according to Copy Right Law you own your words, not Waldo. He has no right to print your whole blog post without your permission. There are two types of permission: Explicit and implicit permissions. Explicit permissions are those granted directly, while implicit permissions are those inherited based your membership in a particular group. Technically, Waldo has no right to print your whole post without your explicit permission, but does so anyway. Bottom line, we are doing Waldo a favor by being a member and sharing our intellectual property with him and others. Without us WaldoGÇÖs aggregator dies. Waldo needs a little more humility.

Blog Net News ("BNN") is a fine service and my blog is syndicated there (as well as on four other feeds, including VPB), however I prefer VPB for the same reason that many people do--I can quickly scan all the headlines and posts from a single page, without clicking in and out of posts.  While the statistics BNN collects might interest some, to me they are a visual distraction.  This isn't meant as a criticism of BNN, and I am sure that there are many that prefer BNN to VPB.  If Mr. Maxfield wants to leave VPB, he has only to ask Mr. Jaquith and ask to added to BNN.  It isn't clear to me why he hasn't asked to be removed from VPB yet.

Next, the issue of the alleged "theft" of intellectual property.  We will leave aside the potential defamatory impact of Mr. Maxfield's accusations for the moment and get straight to the question of whether there has been any violation of copyright law.  I am not an intellectual property attorney, and what I offer is not to be construed as a legal opinion for any purpose.  Rather, I simply want to give a common sense reading of what Mr. Maxfield has said on his website.

Mr. Maxfield tells us that there are two kinds of permission: explicit and implicit, and he argues that we have given neither to Mr. Jaquith.  Really?  Mr. Jaquith's aggregator functions like every other site of its kind, by reading a "feed" put out by each of our websites.  It would seem to me that turning on your public "feed" is in itself a kind of implicit consent to let others use that feed.  Moreover, Mr. Jaquith provides a permanent link to the blogs that he publishes and he provides links to the specific posts on VPB, acknowledging their authorship.  Bloggers can, at any time, request that they be removed from VPB, and to the extent that they have not made such a request after becoming aware of their inclusion I would also think that was an implied consent.  Finally, I think that the fact that the Republican blogger in question has complained loudly about his removal constitutes either an explicit request to be included or, in the alternative, an admission that he had previously given his implied permission.

If I were the managing partner of Mr. Maxfield's law firm, I would be a little concerned about the professional judgment of an associate that spends his time broadcasting erroneous legal opinions and defamatory statements into the blogosphere. Having a law degree and a bar admission is no excuse for being a bully or launching a campaign of harassment.  Mr. Maxfield's behavior reflects poorly on himself and his law firm.

Time magazine recently named the users of the internet the "Person of the Year" because of the new and different ways we are using the internet--and more to the point, the blogosphere--in our political and social activities.  If I were an editor or a reporter for an MSM outlet, like The Washington Post for instance, I'd find the story of Republican bloggers posting snuff films and defending that practice an interesting idea for an article about the abuses of the blogosphere.  Perhaps they could interview the managing partner of Mr. Maxfield's law firm, just to get his perspective.

Food for thought.

Cross posted from The Richmond Democrat.

UPDATE!  It has been confirmed that "John Maxfield" is a Republican fraud.  Details here.

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