The Discovery Channel has done a complete three sixty on its stance and relationship with one fan site for the popular show “Deadliest Catch”. DeadliestCatchTV.com has been live since 2007 frequently posting updates and commentary after each episode. John White, the fan site administrator announced the other day that Discovery Channel had sent him a cease and desist letter telling him to remove content and hand over the domain name by August 11th. This news came as a total shock to DeadliestCatchTV.com community since over the last two years an employee from the Discovery Channel was in contact with Mr. White sending him press release kits, promotional material, video preview and praise for his work promoting Deadliest Catch via the fan site. You can even follow this link to see that The Discovery Network still has DeadliestCatchTV.com ‘wrapped’ on one of their official Discovery Channel pages. If that’s not bad enough, you’ll still see the link to DeadliestCatchTV.com when you view the Deadliest Catch ‘Dashboard’ —> Web Sites —> Fan Sites.
There are a hundred different Deadliest Catch fan sites, so why did Discovery Channel decide to go after DeadliestCatchTV.com? Well, the TM is in the domain sure.. also, they claim that it was illegal to embed videos from the official Discovery YouTube Channel – even though Discovery failed to turn off embedding capability. Is this right? According to YouTube TOS:
“… You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service…”
Mr. White has indicated that DeadliestCatchTV.com will be handed over to Discovery Channel as requested tomorrow, August 11th. I agree with most of the commenters in his last blog post that this is a classic case of corporate bullying but hey… that should teach everyone a lesson not to develop on anything that resembles a TM domain. I feel for the site owner as he is going to lose alot of time and hard work. it seems like his readers were loyal and may follow him to another site.
As for the show Deadliest Catch, I stopped watching it after it turned into a soap opera.
