BOLS frontpage and Faeit gone?

[AnEnemy]

Leaks happen in every industry. Remember when Gawker got their hands on an iPhone before release? Apple didn't sue. Apple didn't even demand that Gawker remove their story. "Legal right" seems to be a favorite term thrown around by the apologists. Didn't Apple have a legal right? Yeah, they could have raked Gawker over the coals because they had a solid case against them. Receiving stolen property to name the most layman charge. They didn't do anything about it. A product that's gone on to make billions and they let Gawker have their pictures. How about you admit that Apple knows a lot more about "business" than GW? How about you stop acting like GW is savvy for doing this?

The video game industry goes through this on a weekly basis. Even sites like Amazon will occasionally post info that companies haven't officially released. Most of the time, not all the time, but the overarching majority of the time...companies will ignore it. They'll write it off as damage done. They understand that attacking your fans with a baseball bat to get them off your lawn doesn't help sales.

The difference here is GW is either insane or...more likely...they understand their fanbase has been conditioned to accept what they do. If, say, Epic had their next GoW game spoiled what do you think they'd do?

Sue a dude with a private blog that caters to a couple thousand people a day? No. They're not morons. They understand that those two thousand people will distribute the story throughout the internet and turn a couple pictures that a few thousand might have seen into multiple millions of people laughing at their company.

How many people in this 19 page thread actually saw the HE scans? I'm willing to bet it's fewer than the number of people that are disappointed in this whole debacle.

GW made a horrible decision. And they are being thanked for it by people that frequent daily one of the very sites effected by their actions. It's appalling to watch so many people patch over their own self interest with loyalty to a brand. Humans usually reserve such reverence for political and religious matters.

[Power Klawz]

I think perhaps the people you are deeming "apologists" (HA!) are something far more mundane. The apt word would be apathetic. There are no victims here, no real injustice has been done. Maybe GW's actions are peeving some people off, but generally speaking some people are just always in a hurry to be peeved off. Being indignant is a great American pastime, I'm sure it similar in other parts of the developed world.

I tend to save my righteous indignation for things that actually matter personally. Being a wargames hobbyist is just something that I do because I am a big old nerd. I also enjoy building computers and BMWs, because I am a big old nerd with a decent job. None of these things really amount to much of anything in the course of human endeavor however. If GW shuttered its doors forever tomorrow I guess I'd be a little bummed out, but honestly it doesn't affect me or the world enough to get up in arms about it.

So yeah, I really feel that apologist is far too grandiose a term to be waving around in such an insignificant context.

I don't give GW my money out of religious devotion or anything like that. I give them my money because Orks is da best, and sometimes my wife lets me go shopping.

[Nurglitch]

I think the notion is in the Apologia, or the explanation of why this isn't a big deal. One site was posting material in contravention of their user agreement and got taken down for it. Life goes on. I mean, have you noticed the little disclaimer everyone posting here signed onto when we registered? We post in the forum at the leisure of the BOLS owners, and they can delete or ban accounts however it strikes them. In other words, if you're going to promulgate other people's stuff, don't do so in collusion with an unwilling partner who made you sign a contract saying you wouldn't.

[Denzark]

Breasts?

I'll buy that for a dollar...

[The Girl]

And we are live: [url]http://www.belloflostsouls.net[/url]

Front page is back up. If you aren't seeing it, give it some time for everything to synch up again. Every network will take a different amount of time to register the new redirect.

[Bigred]

UPDATE:

We are back up and running - full steam ahead! We are working with google to determine exactly what occurred over the last 24 hours with the BoLS frontpage, but I would like to clear up a couple of things for the record:

1) BoLS was never targeted by any DMCA, IP, or any other violation notices. While other 3rd party sites on blogger may or may not have been targeted by Games Workshop and/or Google, BoLS never was.

2) We take our security and availability seriously. Steps are being taken to prevent such an occurrence from ever happening again. BoLS job is to provide you with wargaming news, opinion, and entertainment day in and day out - and we will do exactly that.

On a personal note, I would like to thank each and every one of you who showed up during the frontpage outage and got to see and explore the BoLS Lounge. We are very proud of our great wargaming forum community and hope many of you return.

Look for regular posts, columns and commenting as usual on the frontpage as of now.

Best regards and my deepest thanks,

-Larry Vela

[confoo22]

Leaks happen in every industry. Remember when Gawker got their hands on an iPhone before release? Apple didn't sue. Apple didn't even demand that Gawker remove their story. "Legal right" seems to be a favorite term thrown around by the apologists. Didn't Apple have a legal right? Yeah, they could have raked Gawker over the coals because they had a solid case against them. Receiving stolen property to name the most layman charge. They didn't do anything about it.

Uh, there was a full on criminal investigation into how they acquired the phone including warrants issued, the searching of one of Gawker's editor's homes, questioning of the person who found and sold the phone, and ultimately Apple asked for the device back, which Gawker gave to them. The only reason that Apple didn't sue, which I take it is what you mean by "didn't do anything" is because it was determined that someone at the company had lost it and therefore it was not "stolen property," so therefore there was no criminal activity. It's seriously laughable that you would act like Apple is some kind of PR whiz considering they recently sued Samsung for $2.5 BILLION over the Galaxy SIII, with one of the complaints being that their phones were similarly shaped to an ipad.

And PS: GW isn't suing Natfka, they sent a takedown notice to Google asking them to remove a single post on Natfka's site. It was Google who made the ultimate decision to take down the site.

[DarkLink]

There's a very, very big difference from a potentially stolen piece of expensive technology like a new Iphone, and posting a couple of pictures. Someone steals an Iphone, and they can reverse engineer it and do all sorts of legitimately illegal stuff with it. If you think posting a picture of an upcoming release is the same thing as stealing said release, you wouldn't make a very good lawyer.

[Power Klawz]

There's a very, very big difference from a potentially stolen piece of expensive technology like a new Iphone, and posting a couple of pictures. Someone steals an Iphone, and they can reverse engineer it and do all sorts of legitimately illegal stuff with it. If you think posting a picture of an upcoming release is the same thing as stealing said release, you wouldn't make a very good lawyer.

If you could get someone else to believe that they are the same thing however, you'd make an excellent lawyer.

[daboarder]

It's seriously laughable that you would act like Apple is some kind of PR whiz considering they recently sued Samsung for $2.5 BILLION over the Galaxy SIII, with one of the complaints being that their phones were similarly shaped to an ipad.

Lets be fair,

The S3 is a FANTASTIC phone. I'm half convinced that apple sued because they wished they'd released it.