What gets old to me is the rampant IP theft here in the Philippines.

@MM: that’s quite a long non-response from the DOT. Would this have been nicer and simpler?

Dear MM,

I’m sorry about all the trouble. We have removed the offending pages. We will do our best to avoid such problems in the future.

Sincerely,

Secretary Kaw

Atty Kaw – I don’t even know if you’ve read anything inside marketmanila, but it takes a decent man to own responsibility for his actions. May it be a contractor or not, the accountability still falls on the DOT. One of the reasons why our country fails in so many ways is that we keep on pointing fingers. As you’re the ones in position , own the responsibility and do what needs to be done. Stop beating around the bush as it fixes nothing.

Tess Aguirre (or whoever you may be) – To each his own. Please don’t include other marketmanila readers on however you view MM’s rants. Some of us (including me) are rather fond of his rants (I actually await for his fish pan awards). This is MM’s blog and of course he’s entitled to post whatever he wants to post.

Nobody still takes responsibility/accountability. (Even if the job is outsourced, the one who researched and/or approved the subcontractor is accountable for the result and performance of the person/project.) No proper apologies.

It is great that you are magnanimous in showcasing Zubuchon, which is reflective of Filipino hospitality and our culture but at the end of the day, business is business. Time equates to money and lost time equates to lost income (directly or indirectly).

With initial exposure on AB’s NR, further publicity not just in the last months but in the forthcoming months, I suggest that a 2-3 hour window in the afternoon (1 or 2 days a week) be allocated for ‘tour/promotional’ visits (without meals).

BTW, one of your Dragon traits is showing…relentless and will not give up until satisfied…;-)

Punong-puno naman ng ‘bureaucrat-ese” ang explanation ng DOT. Ganyan ata talaga kung walang masabi… ;)

The “Wayback Machine” is an archive of cached webpages that have been crawled in the past. Here is the link for the partial url from DOT:
https://wayback.archive.org/web/*/https://www.tourism.gov.ph/sitepages/*
From the results, it _SEEMS_ that the “top 10 things to eat” page is not “web crawl-able” (no link could be traced to the home page) since no pages were crawled and archived in their 2009-2010 copies. From this “rookie investigation” of mine, at least that statement of Atty. Eugene Kaw appears to be “true”:
(Maybe some readers are more adept at trying to uncover an “internet paper trail”?)

“Accordingly, in the final version of the website in early 2009, the ITD removed such particular page in the menu on “Plan a trip/What to do.” Unfortunately and inadvertently, however, despite its deletion, the particular page remained in the web server, which has enabled those who have kept and maintained the old web link to the article to continually view it, and also became viewable or searchable to the online community. Thus, it would appear to them that the same is still on the DOT website as a feature. To date, the ITD had already permanently removed the file from the web server so that the same article will no longer be mistakenly associated with the DOT. ”

I put “true” in double quotes because it would be close to impossible to prove or disprove on MM’s side since no proper steps we performed to properly establish that the page was not a “test page” as Atty. Kaw and the DOT seem to insist.
On DOT’s side, they could conjure up some bogus “paper trail” just to satisfy MM.

MM, as much as I would like to see justice served, it seems like a fruitless cause to continue at this point. You can’t officially sic your own lawyers even if you wanted to since you have no “proper evidence” and you’ll never in a million years get the DOT to man-up and admit that their copyright infringement. That’s why the DOT has Atty. Kaw in the first place; to legally get around having to admit any wrongdoing.