Gawker Defeated In The Battle of Shiloh

Posted on June 8, 2006

Gawker was initially labeled a hero by some bloggers for its refusal to remove from its website a photograph of baby Shiloh taken from the cover of Hello magazine. Gawker was one of the few blogs that continued to run the incendiary baby photo cover, even after receiving threatening letters from Time Warner's lawyers. The blogosphere was properly shocked and awed. Claiming that posting a small thumbnail of the pictures was within the "fair use" exception of copyright law, the site clung firmly to its interpretation of intellectual property law as a bedrock in a stormy sea of imminent litigation.

Alas! Gawker's own attorneys then weighed in on the matter, telling Gawker that while posting a thumbnail of a magazine cover was acceptable, that running the new photos from the inside of the magazine was most definitely not. And with that bit of devastating friendly fire, The Battle of Shiloh was lost.

And while we will gladly look at the pictures, coo like idiots, and then link to places where they can be found, we just can't post them. We can and will stand on our fair-use high horse all we want about a thumbnail pic of the Hello! cover (which, per our original offer to Time Inc. counsel Nick Jollypants, we have now changed to the People cover), but we really can't use the same justification for the fuzzy, cloying photos floating around from Hello!. Sorry - but this time, turns out that posting the pics actually is illegal. Or so we're told. Our lawyer could just be drunk and not wanting to deal. Whatever. We're still working through the first round of legal woes from 2 days ago, and we can�t even keep track of what we are and aren't allowed to do anymore.

The Battle of Shiloh is over, but it will never be forgotten.