McFreedom

Man, I so know that feeling. So, as hit /. yesterday, Nintendo sent a cease and desist letter to a website that allows members to set up (adultish) user areas. It seems one user had mentioned that she liked a couple of Nintendo games in her site. This letter, of course, caused a great backlash, and Ninentdo has now quickly apologized and offered free games to the victims.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that corporations are monolithic entities - that an organization as large even as Nintendo speaks with one voice, that no single missive issues forth from the entity without the blessing of the whole. Nothing is of course, further from the truth - it is not uncommon for different divisions of a corporation to even be at odds with each other. We had this exact scenario happen at EMusic. We were very conscious of being community-friendly, and worked hard to reach out to the open-source and hacker communities. Unknown to us, a group of students made a little MP3 player they called "Emusic." Unfortunately, the way the executive management at Emusic found out about it was when the founder of a company we'd bought - someone not really picked by us, or aware of our culture - let us know he'd already sent them a cease and desist letter.

This resulted in the CEO and I frantically calling all these developers late at night, trying to get in touch with them an preempt the story before it got to Slashdot. It's a terrible feeling when some person operating in your name goes out and does something stupid, thinking about the little picture and ignoring the big one. I'm sure some people at Nintendo spit their coffee out when they saw this story in the press, and kudos to them for cleaning it up as well as they did.