Who wins when a media empire goes head to head with an individual?  Well, when you’re Tumbledore, a Tumblr user, the answer is, “Not you.”  He went to check his Tumblr feed and found one of his accounts, pitchfork.tumblr.com, had been moved to pitchfork1.tumblr.com.  Why was it moved?  So Pitchfork Magazine could take over the feed.  He believes that Tumblr and Pitchfork stole his domain name.  However, things aren’t that clear cut.

On one hand, you’ve got the original poster, who did sign up for the pitchfork.tumblr.com account.  On the other hand, you’ve got Tumblr, who believed the account to have been abandoned since the last post was from November 2009 and said, explicitly, “This filter is obsolete.”  On the third hand, you’ve got Pitchfork and whoever is in charge of their social media relations, who are trying like crazy to get ahead of the curve on this issue by issuing a direct response to the concerns, offering to relinquish the Pitchfork Tumblr account.  It’s a thorny issue, to be sure.  Like most copyright issues, there’s no clear-cut answer.

Personally, I believe the Tumblr account was abandoned, but that doesn’t mean Tumblr should just be able to give it to whoever might want it.  There needs to be some kind of established rules on this issue, otherwise every company is going to request their vanity Tumblr feeds be given to them willy-nilly.  November 2009 was less than six months ago!  I don’t think Pitchfork Media did this deliberately; I think Tumblr did it for them in an attempt to play nicely with a big-name media company at the expense of an inactive individual user.

Tags: Pitchfork, Pitchfork Media, Tumbledore, Tumblr, social media, social network, new media, Tumblr account stolen from man, accounts, brand ownership, brands, abandoned Tumblr accounts

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