Somebody at AMC really screwed up.
Let’s say that you are a cable network with a hot show heading into season 2, your best show yet in fact, so successful some fans are impersonating the characters online and writing new dialogue for them (aka Fan Fiction)… What do you do? Easy, if your AMC, you make sure they know how little you appreciate hard core fans and threaten legal action in order to get them to stop.
I love the show Mad Med. Its a great throw back to a pretty sexy, although archaic, romanticized American history. And I am not alone. Some fans dig the show so much they embraced the characters by role playing them on the popular micro-blogging service Twitter [To catch up those unaware, Twitter is a somewhere between blogging and instant messaging, you send little 140 (cell phone text max) or less message to your network of contact].
Twitter folk are on this service all day, especially the die-hards. A lot of natural discussions happen in real time on this site, so naturally people discuss what they are passionate about, promote products, brands, websites, news, etc. This group of people came together organically and chose to have a little fun and play with their favorite tv characters.
Nine psuedo-characters from the show eventually began tweeting, writing in the voices of their counterparts on the show. Its great fun and pretty entertaining, especially when you consider the only people reading what they are writing are other fans of the show that choose to “follow” their tweets. Here is a sampling of tweets from one of the most populr characters, Peggy Olson:
@joan_holloway has it all wrong. I know the other office girls aren’t jealous. They wouldn’t want this job. But I’m not like the other girls (peggyolson)
I’m not sure I’m following these kids with their “young ideas” but Duck says we need them to get new accounts. So here’s to young ideas… (Roger_Sterling)
Bottom line is someone saw infringement here on AMC’s product and brand, Mad Men. Maybe a writer, probably on overzealous, soon to be fired legal type. But if AMC has anyone with some sense that works for them they would have and should have encouraged this. They had something being done for free, that you can’t buy, ravenous fans, evangelists even, of their product promoting it in a fun way to their peers. Was the brand being harmed? Not at all.
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