LBC are bullies – pass it on

Ben Goldacre's post critiquing LBC presenter Jeni Barnett's broadcast about MMR and vaccination in general has caused quite a storm:

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. It's a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry. Science always changes so you can believe what you like. It's a debate and a controversy. Measles was never that bad anyway. Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated. Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated. And so on.

The original version of Ben's post included a recording of the entire vaccination-related segment of the show, as he felt that he'd be accused of cherry-picking damning phrases and presenting them out of context if he posted shorter excerpts. This led to legal threats from LBC, ostensibly on the grounds of copyright infringement.¹ Given that Ben Goldacre was neither charging for access to LBC's material, trying to pass his site off as LBC's, nor competing with LBC in any sense whatsoever I think it's a pretty safe bet that LBC are exercising their intellectual property rights in order to silence a critic, as opposed to their trying protect their commercial interests by stopping someone else from making money on the back of their content.

You'd think by now that media companies would know that trying to bully online critics can backfire horribly: a first draft of a transcript of the LBC broadcast can be found at SciencePunk, and links to recordings of the broadcast are popping up at Wikileaks and on YouTube. Never mind about the MMR issue; I'd like to think that LBC are about to be taught a very public lesson about how to deal with online critics. I'll be very disappointed if The Guardian fails to run with this story about an attempt to silence one of their columnists, even if this particular story wasn't one of his columns for the paper.

1. I Am Not A Lawyer, but I suspect that they have a point that posting an entire 40-minute segment of a show is at the very limit of acceptability as far as quotation-for-the-purposes-of-criticism goes. ↩