Blogger Sued for Posts Criticizing Maine’s Department of Tourism
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 04.28.06 | 1:54 PM ET
Lance Dutson, who posts about Maine tourism at the Maine Web Report, has been sued for defaming the Maine Department of Tourism and violating its advertising agency’s copyright, according to a story in the Boston Globe. “He has written commentaries ridiculing the state’s tourism efforts and, last month, he posted a ‘rough draft’ advertisement pulled from Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development website showing a collage of iconic images of the Maine seacoast, woodlands, and ski slopes, with a dummy phone number that turned out to connect to a line promoting a phone sex service,” the Globe’s Robert Weisman writes. “The agency had inadvertently placed the phone number on the draft advertisement for a presentation made to state tourism officials.”
Dutson is fighting back. He writes on his Web site:
This is crap, total crap and I’m not going to fold, not at this point, They’ve already screwed with me and my family so much, and I will not be bullied into discontinuing my work here. This state agency is wasting money, telling stories, and paying subcontractors who seem more focused on spending their time and money bludgeoning critics with legal threats and lawsuits rather than working to promote Maine tourism.
The entire complaint against Dutson can be found here. And a sampling of the bloggers coming to his defense can be found here.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Ron Mader 04.30.06 | 6:57 AM ET
Thank you for posting this.
The issue I would like to pay attention to is how advertising accounts are managed. Is their public bidding? Independent evaluation? Is any of this information available on the Web? I can’t think of one case in which the answer is yes.
Maine would do well to drop the lawsuit and change the way it promotes tourism.
Ron Mader 12.27.06 | 8:58 AM ET
This is a story that deserves some follow-up. It’s good to see that the case was dropped.
FYI, the blogger’s site now has a section focusing on tourism
http://www.mainewebreport.com/index.php?cat=2