Yahoo! Threatens French-Language Site Over Parody

groov3 writes " A French-language Slashdot-style weblog called pssst received this afternoon a cease and desist letter from lawyers representing Yahoo! They asked them to remove a parody site called Yahoo! Québec (site in French). Problem is: they're not the authors. It seems Yahoo!'s lawyers cannot properly read HTML or URLs. Another amusing case of legal cluelessness. A local online tech news site called Multimédium has more details (in French again)." a limp Babelfish translation of the Multimédium story seems to imply that Yahoo!'s big problem with the parody is the use of the "Yahoo!" trademark and logo itself, changed only by the addition of the word "Quebec." Any French-speaking Slashdot readers care to help us English monolinguists out on this one?Click below for more explanation:

Morph3us writes "Here's some more info on the cease and desist letter from Yahoo! inc. to the French-language weblog pssst! Actually, what Yahoo! INC. doesn't like in this parody is the fact that it is using the actual logo of Yahoo!, with the single addition of the word "Québec" in a very similar font. Also, the search engine used in the parody was searching in a porn site database. Both of these facts could lure visitors into thinking that Yahoo! inc. was associated with the site and was offering a porn site search engine. Pssst doesn't have any power on the site Yahoo! Quebec and even on the link to it in Pssst, because it was posted by an anonymous contributor (although I guess they could delete it from the database). This contributor is also the author of the site and of the first message posted on Slashdot about this story. The author of the site sent me an e-mail today mentionning he had changed the search engine to seek in the Vatican's web site ("from one extreme to the other" as he told me!). He also plans to modify the logo to Youhou! instead of Yahoo! But there's no intention of removing the site at the moment. "

Comments

Tanslation of the mmedium article

[gdon]

Hi fellow Slashdotters ! Here is my humble translation of the mmdeium article. I'm French, so be kind to my English writing. Sorry if this someone already post a similar thing while I'm typing this.



pssst! formaly warned

Montreal (January 12 2000) - the pssst! website from Quebec has been formaly warned by the American company Yahoo! to have allegedly been the author of the Yahoo!Quebec parody!. The editor in chief of Multimédium, Dominic Fugère, and somenone called Mathieu, whose names appeared with the bottom of the parodied page, are also quoted in the formal warning.

The Yahoo!Quebec site, a parody of the famous American portal Yahoo!, was created a few months ago by Jean-Hugues Roy, organizer of the Branché emission in Radio-Canada.

Surprisingly, this one was not quoted in the formal warning and was thus not well-informed yet when we joined it in evening. " I will begin with carefully read the formal warning and will re-examine the laws on the cybersquatting and other laws on the marks of trade before deciding if I will withdraw the site, answers it. I perhaps will modify the search engine and the graphics of the logo. "

In his parody, Jean-Hugues Roy used the exact logo of Yahoo!, to which it added the word " Quebec ". As for the search engine of the parodied page, it searches the data base of a directory of porn sites. These are the two details which probably exacerbated the susceptibility of Yahoo! Inc. Extracts of the formal warning, sent by the lawyer company Smart & Biggar from Ottawa, seem to confirm this assertion.

" I believed that Yahoo! was the last big company to have the sens of humour, affirms Jean-Hugues Roy. There are several parodies of Yahoo!. Some are even indexed in their search engine! "

Clement Laberge, the person in charge of the pssst! website, to which the formal warning is mainly intended, has until next Monday, January 17, to inform the lawyers of Yahoo! that he withdrew the site, thing which he cannot do by himself because he doesn't have control on the site.



Thanx to Bablefish for the canvas.

Hope this helps

OffTopic addition : Any Linux/Free Software job in Toulouse, France ?

From a Quebecois, why it IS parody:

[Enoch Root]

I realise the humour of Yahoo! Québec is gonna be hard to grasp even for other French speakers, because it's very Québec-oriented. But when I loaded the page, I couldn't help but laugh, and the humour was immediately apparent to me.

Here's the thing: spoken Québecois is a variation of France French. Technically, we write the same French (with a few "Canadianisms" thrown in) but our spoken French is radically different, filled with expressions and pronounciation variants that even the French have a lot of problem to understand. When we speak in Québecois before a French, it's not unusual to get a blank stare, followed by 'Pardon?'

There's a whole debate about Québecois slang. Is it a true language? Or is it a deformation brought about by lack of rigor and education? The snobs and well-bred try to mimic Parisian French, but otherwise, you'll hear Québecois everywhere you go. And so, even though everyone speaks it, Québecois is considered 'vulgar' or common by many people. (Some Québecois artists claim otherwise and sing in Québecois, but that's another story.)

So, most of Québec's search engines are coupled with French ones, because we have the same written language. But Yahoo! Québec's humour rests in this: it is written in an imitation of spoken Québecois, and belittles the small-town, close-minded Québecois mentality.

That's why, for instance, under the listing "Régions", you see the following headers: "Us", "Africans", "The South". Most small-minded Québecois without education would only recognise these three distinctions.

Under the news box, we see items such as, "René Simard enceint" ('René Simard [Québec artist, male] pregnant'; cheap joke.) "Gouverne Ment" means 'Government' but is a play on words of 'Govern' and 'lie'. And so on.

So, it's definitely a parody. It's funny, too. Just in case it wasn't obvious, tabarnak!