If You Want To Help Promote Dragonball With A Fan Site, Please Register For Approval First

Stupidity

from the can-we-explain-how-word-of-mouth-works? dept

Petréa Mitchell writes "Way back when the entertainment industry first found out about the net and the Web, some parts of it got the screaming heebie-jeebies on discovering that people had built fan web sites. Legal threats were dispatched in all sorts of directions (the biggest battle, as I recall, was over Star Wars and Star Trek sites), but cooler heads eventually prevailed, and these days the fan sites are allowed, or even actively supported as a means of promoting the shows and movies they adore. Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. Check out these “guidelines” from FUNimation, the US distributor of Dragonball, where they kindly allow you to have a Dragonball fan site if you register as an affiliate, sign away your right to have disputes settled in court, make sure your site is “of a quality satisfactory to FUNimation”, don’t engage in parody or satire, etc." Well, at least they aren’t sending bills to those they encouraged to promote their brand. However, it does show how out of touch some brands are in letting the lawyers step in and decide under what terms they want people to help spread their message by word of mouth. In this case, it seems like the company is trying to find a balance between protecting its own trademark and allowing fans to continue, but at some point people need to realize that any attempt at controlling word of mouth efforts pretty much destroys the whole point of any word of mouth promotion.