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Didn't something like this happen to the hacker magazine, 2600?

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/05/18/1421201.shtml

It seemed like Eric Corely purchased the domain: http://fuckgeneralmotors.com/ and pointed it to http://ford.com/

I think it went to court. The last time it checked in, it was ruled in favor of Eric Corely, because it would otherwise violate his free speech.

How would this be any different?

You read slashdot, and you don't know about something like, say, this?

Reminds me of the problems 2600 was having with ford. Ford didn't like them linking to thier site so they sued them. 2600 then found out that ford was sueing a bunch of people for stupid reasons, such as Jaguarenthusiastsclub.com, which is an animal site. You can read about it HERE. The case recently got droped BTW.

However, the site does not disparage General Motors (aside from the domain name, of course). What it does do, however, is redirect you to the Ford website. That's what Ford is upset about. To the average idiot, it may seem that the site was set up by Ford.

Restating the obvious since 1992,

Ford Motor Company has officially and unconditionally conceded its complete, utter, and perpetual loss on the merits of the FORD v. 2600 "FuckGeneralMotors.com" case. Ford has dismissed its appeal to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, meaning that Ford has completely given up all attempts to reverse the victory that 2600 Enterprises won on December 20, 2001. The mutually agreed dismissal papers were officially entered by the Sixth Circuit on June 27, 2002.

In the words of another FORD from Michigan -- former President Gerald Ford, "Our long national nightmare is over."

2600, which has given up nothing other than an extremely improbable claim for getting its attorneys' fees back from FORD, has expressly reserved the right to point "FuckGeneralMotors.com" anyplace whatsoever that 2600 pleases -- including at the FORD homepage -- at any time whatsoever, with or without notice.

Of course, the plan in March, 2001, when the lawsuit arose, was to point the address someplace more suitable than the FORD homepage, probably as soon as mid-April or early May, 2001. In other words, the lawsuit has actually delayed 2600's prior plans (several other domain names that were part of the same project have been re-pointed several times, while FuckGeneralMotors.com has remained pointed at FORD). Now that the lawsuit has been won, 2600 will be soliciting suggestions during the H2K2 conference, for the best place to point the Domain Name. Ultimately, this just proves how silly and counterproductive FORD's litigation strategy always has been from the beginning.

In December, 2001, Judge Robert Cleland of the Eastern District of Michigan, dismissed FORD's lawsuit in its entirety for "failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted" -- which means that even assuming every single allegation in FORD's pleadings to be true (but the allegations weren't all true), FORD still had no legal right whatsoever to prohibit 2600 from pointing FuckGeneralMotors.com at FORD's homepage.

Needless to say, FORD did not like that outcome. Neither did a lot of other intellectual property interests all over the world. Indeed, a google search will reveal a number of PowerPoint(tm) presentations published on the Web (e.g., http://austlii.edu.au/ hkitlaw/resources/Pun_IP.pdf) by various intellectual property lawyers, emphasizing that the decision is being appealed. Well, now it isn't.

The decision stands. It is published at 177 F. Supp. 2d 661. And it is binding precedent. The decision has even been cited by the Sixth Circuit already, in an interim order that was issued in the "TaubmanSucks" case handled by Paul Levy of Public Citizen. http://www.citizen.org/documents/TaubDecision-3-11 -02.pdf .

When FORD filed its appeal to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in January, 2002, FORD sought to have the case reinstated so that FORD could take it to trial. 2600 filed a cross-appeal, solely on the issue of whether FORD should be required to reimburse 2600 for its legal bills (such fee awards, in cases under the Lanham Trademark Act, are not especially common and occur only in "exceptional" cases -- so the Sixth Circuit was likely to defer to Judge Cleland's decision to award 2600 its "costs" but not its attorneys' fees). 2600 still gets to take its "costs" back from FORD, and our lawyer is preparing to serve a deposition notice on Bill Ford, to gather the information necessary to garnish FORD's bank accounts, unless FORD cuts us a reimbursement check forthwith.

But the key point is that 2600's victory is permanent and FORD has voluntarily foregone any appeals. The savings, in terms of attorneys' fees, from our standpoint, are enormous.

In fact, I'd consider it a free and useful service (bear with me) to roughly measure the winds of hate against my 'evil' corporation. Usually you have to pay someone to gauge public opinion for you, but here you can simply measure the change in day-today hits from pissed off people who ended up visiting an 'anti-something' site that led them to you.

Also -- and I don't know why this point hasn't been touched on much -- I would check the HTTP_REFERER sent by (most) browsers, and redirect to a propaganda page of my own that tried to change opinions. I just checked and apparently Ford isn't even smart enough to implement this; all their money goes to lawyers I guess.

</Devil's Advocate>

--

And i'm linking to your modem! !!!!!!

I don't think I could sleep well tonight if i didn't mention the links that pissed Ford off so much that 2600 is now in a lawsuit (big news).

They registered fuckgeneralmotors.com which contains nothing but a single link to ford.com. You can find information about 2600's crusade here.

Just try to /. 2600

No, 2600 still owns FuckGeneralMotors.com and FordReallySucks.com. So, this might give them a leg up on the FordReallySucks.com site, but who knows about FuckGeneralMotors.com.

Ford sued 2600 for redirecting visitors of FuckGeneralMotors.com to Ford.com. Apparently visitors to the site might think that Ford is trying to harm GM. Ford's customers are stupid, I guess. They even have the transcript available on their website. However, the case is still pending.

According to Emanual Goldstein (aka Cereal Killer ;-) ), that the judge denied Ford an injunction on 2600's use of the domain is a good thing. They apparently don't want to be too heavy-handed.

Oh, and if you're feeling generous, you can donate from their online store. So far (11:45PM EST 19/06/01), donations have taken care of 23% of the fees.




kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.

blenderking sent in this Wall Street Journal story about
Microsoft's new "Smart Tags" - auto linking to Microsoft
websites in any web page you visit.

...This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor for resolution.
_____________________________________ _

Please explain the statement that 2600 has made. What 2600 did is register httpfuckgeneralmotors.com and have it resolve to 164.109.135.183 which is Ford's website. Ford claims that this implies that Ford has done this. Even if it did imply that Ford did this, it only implies that Ford is low class -- not something actionable under libel. In a Mass. case, calling a couple (who ran a restraunt) pigs was not actionable.

I don't see how General Motors has a cause at all. And if they do, better start hiding any hyperlinks you might have used to say something sucks. When you use your page to point visitors (via worded-link) to something that you think blows, you could argue that people aren't even sure what they're going to until they get there. They click a word like 'blows' and it takes them to something which may or may not blow. Hell, if people are as stupid as GM would have us believe, then anyone who clicked that last link is forever convinced that GM BLOWS. But obviously, this is just me expressing my opinion. The issue I'm making is that for GM to have a case, they would have to argue even beyond my use of links, by saying that someone who goes to fuckgeneralmotors.com might be confused, or might think that GM is somehow involved with it, and thusly wants to fuck themselves. GM wants to argue that people don't have the right to link to them in a critical manner, and that people who do are misusing their bandwidth by linking to a publicly accessable website, that is a completely valid target for criticism or parody.

www.fuckgeneralmotors.com

www.fuckgeneralmotors.com

Is there a difference?