Dave Walker meets Barbara Streisand

If you're trying to keep up with the blogosphere fallout from attempts to keep Dave Walker quiet on the story of SPCK, whilst the owners (the Society of St. Stephen the Great, or SSG) pursued bankruptcy in a US court several thousand miles away from most of their major creditors, here's a running collection of links. Todays main business seems to be dissecting the legal arguments in the SSG correspondence with Elizaphanian, who was issued with the same order as Dave after republishing some of the deleted posts (see the comments on his post yesterday). There is a now big fat article on Ministry of Truth which really is worth a read if you want to know whether the arguments stand up.

Meanwhile Phil Groom has posted part of his own C&D order, specifically the bit where he's ordered to take down a website dedicated to fundraising for people made redundant from SPCK.

Phil comments:
But I am now so very, very angry. How dare Mr Brewer target the very page that I set up to raise funds to support the people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by this fiasco??
My only interest in this situation throughout has been to support these people, and (although hopes for this faded some time ago) to try and salvage something from the ruin that SSG has made of the former SPCK bookshops. Why? Because as Dave Walker kept reminding us, “It’s fun to shop at the SPCK”.

Meanwhile after a spate of 'I am Dave Walker' solidarity posts, some are now appearing for Sam Norton too. Sam has published a helpful 'SSG/SPCK for beginners' post today. My hit counter tells me there's been 100+ new people a day coming here to find out what all the fuss is about. For info, my summary is here, Matt Wardmans is here.

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters. Instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks (from Wikepedia 'Streisand Effect')