Why Yell Makes Me See Red

According to Wikinews:

Yell, the world's biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down Yellowikis, the wiki-based yellow pages directory.

Yell accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of "misrepresentation", "passing off" and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could "constitute an 'instrument of fraud'."

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Since Yell is apparently a UK company, this makes me ashamed to be British.

Let's look at the situation. You have a multi-billion pound company tied to a dead-tree model - just think of the resources it is wasting - bullying an open, volunteer project that is completely online (and innovative, to boot), through legal threats based on totally outrageous accusations.

Well, guess what?

I am now going to put all my Yell directories in for recycling, in an attempt to undo some of the environmental damage they have caused. And if Yell send me any more (as they are bound to do), I will try to refuse them; if I can't, I will promptly recycle those, too.

Henceforth, I will conduct all of my searches through Yellowikis, with the odd bit of Google thrown in where necessary. When I ring up companies I will make it clear that I never use dead-tree directories, and that they really should go online, maybe with something like Yellowikis, which is completely free. (Via TechDirt.)