PC hardware blog quotes (within fair use parameters) and links to techie website article. Bizarrely, techie website threatens blog with legal action. Blog goes public with the issue. Slashdot links to blog post about the matter. Two hours later, on a Sunday night, techie website's executive editor sends the following email to blog:

Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:

While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!

We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.

My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly.

I read about this thanks to Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing post entitled Naming-and-shaming on Slashdot: better than hiring a lawyer. I think the title of this post goes one better.

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