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When censorship goes too far, we cannot say Gar-ner anymore

Gar-ner gets what it deserves, all blogs deleted with company name in it as an act of protest

By Larry Chaffin on Sun, 08/09/09 - 10:36am.

I received a really nice email (if you want to call it that) from Gar-ner on Friday. If you are asking who is Gar-ner, well it’s this company that put companies in a square divided into four sections. I received an email asking me to take down my blogs that contained this companies name by them telling the following:

“Per our Copyright and Quote Policy, available at the link below and at any time from Gartner's home page, other companies may only externally quote, mention, reference or display the Gartner name or Gartner research after first obtaining approval in writing, in advance, from my department.  In violation of this restriction, your organization has been using Gartner’s name and research as shown in your blog entry at this link”.

 

Now I am an educated man and I have read the Bill of Rights four times this morning, I cannot find anything in there where this company can tell me I cannot mention their companies name in news article. I think it is called freedom of the press. Do they really think that every press agency is going to call them to ask if they can use the company name? A CMO told me this morning arrogance is bliss and Ga-ner is a lost soul.

 

Now I am going to say that I did not pull any information from the Gar-ner web site, nor did I ask them for any information. The information that I used for my WAN acceleration blogs was from vendors who sent me the information. They sent me the information since they are a vendor and wanted to make sure I was aware of where they were now in the square. Also updated that were made to these after they came out. It was not Cisco or Riverbed who sent me any of the information, hard to believe but it is true.

 

So all of the information I posted and used was sent to me by vendors to make sure I knew the news. But Gar-ner does not see it that way; I still have no idea why. But what I did was to delete all blogs that have this company name in it. By deleting them I am telling them that they mean nothing to me anymore, I will no longer use their name or even care about the square they use. I know some vendors called me on Friday and Saturday to talk to me about the deleted post.

 

They all agreed with me and said it was absorbed to believe that Gar-ner would say you cannot use the company name. Many think it was vendor related and some vendors pushed them to do this as the blogs put some companies in a bad light with their product. I don’t know about that but I agree with the vendor who called me, Gar-ner has gone really too far with censorship.

 

Gar-ner also sent this to me:

 

“Gartner’s published research is proprietary intellectual property of Gartner, Inc., and is protected by the copyright laws of the United States and other countries.  Your company's mention of our research in your material does not comply with our Copyright and Quote Policy (available at the link below) and so this is an infringement of our copyrights. I ask that you take immediate and effective steps to remove this blog posting and also any other unauthorized mention of Gartner’s research in any other venue which you control. “

My last question will be, (just as an example) are they going to ask at every blog that mentions the Gar-ner name be taken down from the Cisco Blog web site? I don’t think they all received permission for each blog entry and asked for it to be cleared by Gar-ner. This is not to mention all of the other sites around the world who use the company name.

To be clear to all of my readers, we will not use, publish or mention the Gar-ner name or any reports in the future. We will come up with our own when it comes to networking, voices, video and other areas.  I am sure we can do a better job any way.

What do you think of this Censorship issue and just using a company name? Imagine if Cisco said that every time you wanted to use the company name you had to get permission just to you use it.

 

Gar-ner gets a big thumb down and just lost an avenue to further its news. I wonder if Ga-ner can say delete, delete, delete, delete and oh did I say delete?