I love that you called us out though – something I have been trying to explain to my bosses for a while now. Can you maybe give them a call and explain?

In broad terms I think I took it to read ‘extend some professional courtesy’, which I think it’s fair to say, is pretty much common sense. Still, there is undoubtedly a major gap between people that ‘get it’ in any capacity and those that clearly don’t.

I can’t promise that we’ll always get it right but I find that courtesy, transparency and honesty seem to count for a good deal.

We have implemented an unofficial policy that polite requests will be dealt with usually the same day. Legal threats will result in the content being removed according to the demand. We point out this policy when responding to these requests and yet still companies will pay for a lawyer to send a letter and let the content remain for a couple of weeks, rather than send an email and just ask nicely.

I think there is a corporate culture problem – the automation of business processes has led to an inflexibility of approach. i.e.

Criticism of company on website => have lawyer send legal threat to website owner.
or;
get blog coverage => buy list of blogger emails, send standard email to everyone, monitor opening and clickthru stats. Present figures in a graph to client.

Sorry to go a bit off-topic but I hope you see the connection.