I wanted to clarify a tweet from yesterday, where I said that "I just got a cease and desist to take down a showcase I did on @pluralsight API training demos. Won't make that mistake again"—if you aren't familiar with them, Pluralsight is “the largest online #ITAdmin, #Developer & creative training library on the planet". Tweets are so bad for getting all the details across, and I wanted to add that I actually agree with the request Pluralsight was making, just not their approach.
What happened was, a link had come across my monitoring, about a Pluralsight training video on APIs, which I curated, and added the link to my API Design research. The problem was that the link was to a 3rd party site, not actually to Pluralsight. The cease & desist email I got was asking me to remove the link to the 3rd party website—which makes sense, and I’m happy to oblige.
What I do not agree with is the approach by Pluralsight in using cease and desist to get me to address the problem. It is a particularly shitty first impression to leave on someone, especially someone who runs one of the top sites for learning about a fast growing space for developers—APIs. As you can tell by this post, I will not ever link to Pluralsight again, and beyond this post you won't catch me talking about them again in stories, white papers, or at my conferences, meetups, and workshops.
Pluralsight is just using an anti-piracy service (which I won't showcase), and think it is a safe bet to say they aren't really aware of what is going on. I’m sure they have a pretty bad piracy problem, but I’m thinking a blind cease & desist campaign might not be the best approach. Maybe a first email saying, “hey! you have a link we don't like, would you consider swapping it out with a valid link?”, might be a better approach.
Anyhoo, we'll file this post under “rant”. I hope your anti-marketing strategy works out for you Pluralsight. I’m really happy to be in a space where I generate content that I can encourage the widest possible distribution, and not have to police websites like Pluralsight does.
