Okay, this is the earliest blog post I have ever done, but it was just too interesting and I must be out of the loop in the world of affiliate marketing. I just received this e-mail and I’m still kind of confused about the whole matter. This was the e-mail:

From - Sat Aug 02 01:03:46 2008
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From: Settlement Recovery Center v. ValueClick settlement
Reply-To: info@embsvc.com
Message-ID: <96f05ef25cb3467a85766e6c171d2d02@bliemail.com>
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 04:01:14 -0400
Subject: Settlement Recovery Center v. ValueClick settlement
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RE: Important Legal Notice Regarding Commission Junction’s Affiliate Network

If you joined or were a member of the affiliate marketing networks operated by ValueClick, Inc., Commission Junction, Inc. and/or Be Free (collectively, “Defendants”), between April 20, 2003 and the present, you may be a class member in Settlement Recovery Center et al. v. ValueClick, Inc. et al., No. 2:07-cv-02638-FMC-CTx, a lawsuit which is pending in the Central District of California. The Settlement Notice informs you of the Court’s certification of a class for settlement purposes; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement or object to the settlement.

The proposed settlement will resolve claims that Defendants failed to adequately monitor Commission Junction’s Network for the use by third parties of software that does not comply with Commission Junction’s (“CJ”) Publisher Code of Conduct and that is intended to steal or divert commissions from publishers on CJ’s network (“Non-compliant Software”), failed to adequately monitor or prevent third parties from engaging in the theft or “hijacking” of commissions from Advertisers and Publishers on CJ’s Network, and failed to make sufficient disclosures regarding the existence of Non-compliant Software and commission theft, resulting in losses to both advertisers and publishers on the CJ Network.

The proposed settlement will provide a monetary recovery to eligible class members. For class members that currently maintain an account on the CJ Network will receive payment through payments or credits deposited or applied to their CJ accounts; eligible class members that no longer have accounts on the Commission Junction Network will receive a check for an equal amount.

If you are a member of the class, your legal rights are affected by whether you act or do not act. You should review the Settlement Notice as soon as possible as there are several important deadlines that you must meet to take certain actions in connection with this proposed settlement. In particular, the deadline for filing an objection or excluding yourself from the proposed settlement is September 30, 2008. For further information, please refer to the Settlement Notice.

For a copy of the Settlement Notice, click on the link, or visit the case website at www.CJSettlement.com

So apparently there is some kind of lawsuit going on against Commission Junction and anyone who signed up as a publisher with them starting from the date stated above should be involved in this. That is me technically I guess. As many of you may know too, I’m personally not a big fan of that company. Feel free to enlighten me about this if you are someone who has been in the loop. I’ll do some more research later on.

I’m sure a lot of people have already heard this in the news in one form or another. For those whose don’t know, Facebook is a social networking site where people can stay in touch with each other and on that site people are able to develop applications such as games for people to use.

There is this one very popular application called “Scrabulous” that is essentially a clone of sort of the board game “Scrabble” where the objective of the game is to create words out of letters to score points. Recently Hasbro, the company that owns the right to the original Scrabble game, has filed a lawsuit against the Scrabulous makers over copyright and infringement.

As expected, you have the majority of the fans not being too happy with this and I read a lot of comments on how the company is just a greedy corporation. At the same time, another common point I read was how with so many people using that application it should in hence translate into more sales of the Scrabble game which should be even more reason for the company to not want to shut that game down.

I always try to look at it from both sides personally. Just thinking about it, how would you react if someone say took the book you wrote and simply changed little details such as the name of the characters and then began to profit over it? Most people wouldn’t be too happy. Thinking even more, if once you realized that the book you bought virtually plagiarized someone else’s work/idea would you still continue to support that work and encourage people to buy it?

While it doesn’t necessarily make it right still, if instead the Scrabulous makers did not profit over this then I would be a little more inclined to say that Hasbro should have been more delicate in its approach such as trying to find a happy medium by addressing its concerns with the original makers. Example, since Hasbro was planning to release its own official version, from what I read, maybe they could have offered those guys a job to say maintain the community and attract more users. Just my thoughts though.