A number of posts generated from a 26-page Best Buy internal document leaked to Gawker Media property Kotaku have been removed by the site under legal threat.
Kotaku deleted eight posts from its servers after electronics retailer Best Buy had its lawyers send along a cease-and-desist letter, claiming the information obtained came from a “copyrighted document.”
All the stories deal with Best Buy’s plans surrounding the Xbox 360 launch coming on Tuesday, November 22nd. The document in question was one designated as for internal use only.
The site noted that since the posts had been up for “nearly a week,” they’d probably been read numerous times anyway. Gawker decided not to bother with the legal hassles and sent the stories to ‘rm -f’ land. At least, that’s what Kotaku said.
However, it appears that the stories still reside on the Kotaku servers. The sharp-eyed users on Digg found that the absolute URLs pointing to the stories still do work. This means that people can still find out Best Buy thinks Madden NFL ’06 and Call of Duty 2, both wildly popular titles on other platforms already, will be big sellers on launch day.
Gawker also has seen its Wonkette blog have a bad experience with Yahoo. The online portal just this week began adding content from five Gawker blogs to various places on the Yahoo network. But an expletive used in a Wonkette story about Vice-President Dick Cheney was replaced with asterisks when displayed on Yahoo.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
