Two errors with the LiveJournal post you're using as a source:

1. Joi Ito isn't on the EFF's board:
[www.eff.org]

The only mention of his name on their entire web server is a pdf of a legal brief. He joined many others in signing it for support in the journalists/bloggers case the EFF handled.

2. Joi Ito didn't "help found Creative Commons" he just joined the board later on.

Owen, I'm surprised you believed the first one when two seconds spent surfing the EFF site reveals he's not actually on the board.

Ok sorry, I misread the LJ post and thought it said that Joi was on the board of EFF, but I think my point still stands: to call adding your name along with 30 others (including former GAWKER EDITORS ZOMG OH NOES I CAN HAS TRANSPARENCY?!!!1!) names on a single legal brief "deep ties" is laughable and stretching the truth to score a dig against 6A.

EFF has also been involved in court cases that have benefited Joi Ito's business/person.

[www.eff.org]

[blogher.org]

Not a good week for Six Apart. the MT 4 launch debacle, the LiveJournal fracas, and its little debacle with Rojo.com, which is *still* down from the 365 Main outage. After two weeks, I think it's time to say funeral rites for Rojo.

@Matt Haughey: I didn't recite, or repeat, the post's claims -- I merely said that they made a decent point in bringing up the issue. Ito does have ties to all of those organizations, which is, some would say, worth disclosing before asking for people's money.

Owen, what would a proper disclaimer look like?

"LJ supports the following charities (note: the parent company of LJ was once alpha-funded by this one guy that signed an amicus brief by one of these charities and sits on the board of two of them and used to sit on the six apart board (I think) but no longer does). Please keep this in mind and forget the stuff about the charities supporting online rights, copyright reform, and human rights abuses"

And I'm sure any such disclaimer (even a serious one) would warrant a valleywag post mocking it.

Alleygal, this has only been a bad week for SixApart here at Valleywag, which seems to have an incredible hard-on for making reasonably normal news seem salacious and untoward. For example, despite all claims here to the contrary in the post about Brad Fitzgerald leaving SixApart, the truth isn't quite so rumorworthy:

[brad.livejournal.com]

Likewise, the unbelievable assumptions in the post about the pending release of MT4 are just laughable; watching the MT4 release cycle from the perspective of someone who's participating in the betas, and participating in the mailing lists and IRC sessions about the betas, tells an entirely different story. But Valleywag seems to want to read like the worst London tabloid on every issue, and it succeeds.

Oh, and I'd say Matt Haughey has it dead-on with this latest "issue" -- if you can seriously claim that SixApart should have chosen other charities than these based on some incredibly nebulous (and again non-noteworthy) second-degree and third-degree relationships between Joi Ito and all the above players, then you need to take a few steps back.

Delfuego, I have to agree with you. It seems that Owen Thomas, in particular, gets quite the kick out of skewing and stretching anything related to SixApart and Livejournal to make it sound like the scandal of the century.

It's particularly curious that he spends so much time on SixApart and Livejournal, especially since he starts off the piece by asserting that Livejournal is undeserving of the attention.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

Yeah, especially since this very site is published on a 6A product.