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2600 Magazine Defeats Ford
narftrek cut-and-pastes the text from 2600's announcement that Ford has conceded the case they brought against 2600 over a certain domain. Our earlier story has some background. A Volvo repair shop near me is named "Island Vo Vo"; the L is silent, you see, because Ford really sucks.
Posted 28 Jun 2002 05:40:29 UTC
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.
Never confuse volume with power.
They registered this name too a couple of years ago.
There isn't anything there now, but I do remember something being up there at one point.
""the L is silent because Ford really sucks"
You know, it's moments like this that make me realize that the vapid, heartless, childish, snide front-page editorializing on slashdot is the only reason i still read this damn site.
keep up the good work, cheers
Ford sucks. No, really, we mean it. Long and hard. And Ford swallows. Spit. Skeptical? Don't just take our word for it. Just ask the guy who registered fordsucks.com. Or the guy who registered classicvolvo.com and wound up facing a legal battle. (Yes, Volvo is owned by Ford, as is Mazda, Lincoln, Mercury, Jaguar and Aston-Martin.) Or you can ask Wally Rawson, a third-generation seller of replacement parts for Ford cars and trucks. Wally registered 4fordparts.com and 4fordtrucks.com as part of his parts business. Ford sued him. At the same time, Ford sued Hans Rekestad (the guy in Sweden running ClassicVolvo.com). The fordsucks guy was also named in the same lawsuit.
--SNIP--
Ford didn't just sue. Ford asked for $100,000 in damages. Not for all these cases put together - $100,000 per address! And Ford won't just let any of these people give up the names and walk away. Ford won't reimburse them for their registration and renewal costs.
Wally Rawson (the parts guy) didn't want to be bothered with the lawsuit, so he just gave Ford both names. Ford is still suing him. Ford tells him he can't crawl out of the soup until he pays Ford $6000.00 ($3000 per name). The fordsucks guy, evidently, decided it would be cheaper to pay the blackmail than to fight it out in court.
Read More
I thought that page was worth a read.
Soccer Goal Plans
Basically, 2600 is telling users to say "Shove it!" to GM and buy a Ford. It's almost a form of (negative) advertising.
The one who should be angry is General Motors. They're the ones being told to screw off.
Its interesting that the links info is a bit outdated.n fo.html)
(http://www.fordreallysucks.com/more_i
The page hasn't been updated in some time. Nasser is no longer president/ceo of ford. In fact, a Ford family member (William Clay Ford) is now running things again (which hasn't happened in a while).
Check out http://money.cnn.com/2001/10/30/ceos/ford/ for info.
I'm afraid I'm going to post without having too great an understanding of the entire situation - nothing new to /., of course, but still.. at any rate, the site in question isn't too immediately informative as to what all of this is about, but as far as I can tell, Ford took 2600 to court for pointing www.fuckgeneralmotors.com to Ford's website.
Now, whilst I'm all for freedom of speech, isn't it perhaps understandable that Ford should have been upset, or concerned, by this? Whilst the link was presumably set up as a kind of compliment to Ford (at GM's expense), it's easy to see that Ford would be upset by such a move - the page might well, to the non-tech-savvy, look as though it had been set up *by* Ford themselves; hardly a professional image to betray.
In cases like this where it's not immediately clear *who* is doing the "speaking", isn't the concept of "freedom of speech" clouded? Wouldn't this stray into libel territory, where words are being essentially "put into the mouth" of Ford? Certainly, anyone with the technical knowhow could determine who the page *was* owned by - but many people don't have that technical knowledge, and will go with their gut reactions.
Of course, legal action is a typically heavy-handed response. Nonetheless, if I'm reading the situation correctly then I can feel a certain empathy for Ford's initial reaction..
we would see the following domain name registered:
o m
http://www.fuckfordfuckthemuptheirstupidasses.c
(which is free, btw)
-D
This isn't the "Jilted lovers of Gerarld, Lita, and Mary Ford" support group?
I'm surprised any of these suits would have ever gotten anywhere. These seem to clearly be an issue of one person expressing their -opinion- about various things. Either GM, (the company or the product) and Ford, (etiher the company or the product.) Get upset all you want, it's their constituational right to have an opinion and express it.
Or has that been changed recently too?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
2600 finally has something to report on which is positive to them. Good thing with H2K2 on the horizon =]
I think one of the major points here is that Ford didn't even have to decency of saying "Hey guys, thats funny, now can you point it elsewhere"
... oddly enough 2600 are adults, and I'm sure they would have pointed the domain elsewhere.
They sued, and lost. Good.
Usually you would think it is just plain old good manners to say "look, stop that, I don't like it"
Also if they had a competent sysadmin, they could have just blocked that url by tweaking IIS. Maybe their MSCEs couldn't work it out perhaps...
Anyhow this smacks of plain ignorance (on Fords part) rather than anything else.
They claim it is improbable to get attorney fees. If they look at some of the cases on Rule 68 and cases that provide for attorney fees, there is precident that says when there is a fee shifting provision with a requirement for the other side to pay costs, the costs do include fees.
Since the case was dismissed for failure to state a claim and they appealed it, but dropped it, I would argue that ford's lawyers should be sanctioned under rule 11 (filing a frivilous action).
Fight Spammers!
With whitearyanresistance.com, org and net. I just wrote a Perl script that would randomly throw people to other sites like algore2000.com, blacksonblondes.com, Southern Poverty Law Center and other places.
It did get me a few death threats and a mention on the weekly radio program of white supremacist and uber sister smoocher Tom Metzger's.
So to Emmanuel Goldstein, CONGRATULATIONS! You have certainly taken your ideas to lengths that would stop other men cold. Most people would give up after the first lawsuit.
To others, if you want to do some nifty activism, hijack urls of organizations you can't stand. If it isn't a registered trademark (which "white aryan resistance" wasn't) you can have fun and get death threats (mostly from illiterates).
It's fun, try it.
http://www.2600.ca
:-)
JC
Its about time that 2600 won a court case...especially one involving linking (or, mybe more appropriately, redirecting). I only wish that they were this unilaterally successful in defending themselves in their DVDCCA case (or, for that matter, even partially successful).
-Turkey
-Turkey
The point is that, though the system is corrupt here, it's worse everywhere else, and has been worse. Think about it. 2600, a bunch described as hackers, vandals, criminals, terrorists, up against Ford Motor Company, which probably has bought thousands of politicians and other officials over the years. Anywhere else, the trial would be a foregone conclusion. 2600 would have been summarily ordered to stop whatever Ford didn't want them doing and that would have been it.
Does anyone know what GM;s stance on this was? The article doesn't mention it at all.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
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,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
Set up some addresses in your host file, and make sure that takes precedance over DNS lookups.
... (you get the picture)
[fords-ip] fordbites.com
[fords-ip] fordsucks.com
[fords-ip]
Then sit and write a shell script that grabs their home page using each of these names, say, once per hour.
They'll be looking at their logs, and see all these Hostname: headers coming through and be totally confused. They'll come after you for spreading these "trademark-tarnishing" domains to the world -- but little do they it's just some stupid script on your server.
Actually, what may even be a bit cooler but takes more time - write a script that generates random Hostname: headers for all requests to Ford's servers..
Hmm.
/- from 2600 -/
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.
Did you even read any of the articles? Ford cared because the owner of "fuckgeneralmotots.com" pointed the domain name at ford.com. They thought that people would think that they (Ford) did do it, and that is why they sued. Ford did not want customers to think that they would buy such a domain name and point it at themselves.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
A Volvo repair shop near me is named "Island Vo Vo"; the L is silent, you see, because Ford really sucks.
No, it's because a bunch of teenage vandals got together and stole the 'L' off the sign. Rather than spend money to buy a new letter, the repair shop simply renamed itself.
For more information, click here.
IMHO, it's very much a non-issue if redirection to another web page upsets the author of the original page. As a web user, it's your duty to learn the basics of its structure.
One of the primary concepts of the WWW is hyperlinking. By its very nature, it can be done by any site, to any site. An extension of this concept is web page re-direction. To blindly make an assumption that an unprofessional sounding domain name linked to a company's competitor was initally created by the first company is foolish.
Could this mistake still happen? Oh, absolutely! Should a company like Ford waste any time worrying about it? Nope! Once the user gets redirected to Ford's own web site - the site should speak for itself. If Ford's own site doesn't vouch for their professional nature and interest a reader in purchasing/leasing one of their vehicles - then the problem is entirely on Ford.
Slapp suits, that is suits meant to silence someone by falsely accusing them of libel or copyright infringement, knowing they don't have the resources to defend themselves, are a terrible menace to free speech. There should be greater consequences for wasting the courts' time with these. In some societies, anyone who came to court with a false accusation would recieve the same penalty the falsely accused would have recieved if convicted. If Ford were ordered to pay the amounts they sought from 2600, to 2600, then Slapp suits might go away. Trying them would be way to risky.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
This is Slashdot; I don't click on questionable links, even if they're on the main page. I can think of one very good reason why I don't blindly click links ;)
Ummm, because you're too lazy to look at your browser's status bar?
Does this set any sort of precedent (legal or practical) in favor of *sucks.* domain names? Is the owner of ClearChannelSucks.org on better footing now than he was a week ago? (I hope so. :)
-Waldo Jaquith
yeah, what the fuck is up with that.
The l isn't silent in island anyway, the s is. So what vosvo ? Even if it was that would make about as much sense as my toejam, as it is though...
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Cases like this are a waste of the legal system's resources
That's what is really, really stupid about your entire argument. Ford brought on the lawsuit; 2600 defended themselves, and yet you blame 2600 for wasting the legal system's resources? How can that possibly make any sense whatsoever? Answer: it can't, and doesn't.
But could'nt ford just as easily (and cheaply) put a little script in their page that checked for the refering web page?
When it showed as 'fuckgeneralmoters.com' as the referer, simply redirect to a disclaimer?
It seems that would be far more logical, save far more in legal fees, and would avoid any confusion.
Again, I could be wrong.
The Internet is generally stupid
Slashdot Sucks :) Damn them for not suing me and making me famous!
I'm really surprised there was no legal recourse for the company involved since it was, at least in some sense, abuse of their property (the domain name) and probably their trademark.
In this case, however, is wan't like you would REASONABLLY expect Ford to own the associated domain. 2600 bought it, it was theirs to do with as they pleased. IMHO, of course.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Yea yea, they won the lawsuit.
But Ford should have to reimburse them for attorney's fees and other damages.
As long as big companies can do this kind of crap without having to pay for it, its going to keep on happening.
What should happen is that Ford should be fined 10 times the damages for wasting 2600's time and the Court's time. That'll act as a deterrent for other companies who want to file frivolous law-suits.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Google stores the text of pages (but not the graphics) when it spiders a site, and makes them available to you, in case, uh, "the site is down". Yeah, that's it.
It's pretty handy to use when someone has yanked a page that turned out to be embarrassing.
Unfortunately the page with the announcement at 2600 was just put up and is apparently not yet available in Google's cache, but will be at some point.
Another alternative is to use The Anonymizer. Here is 2600's announcement of Ford's surrender, which you should be able to read unless your firewall blocks the anonymizer too.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Besides being outrageous, Ford's actions also violate the basic ideals of the internet.
Linking and domain-name-pointing is what makes the internet what it is. If I make a link --these assholes, and you don't like it, tough shit. Same thing with domain-name pointing.
If you have a problem with linking or domain-name pointing, get the fuck off the net.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
You are correct, even better they could have caught it at the server level without any web page coding.
They could have used it as a draw, not fought against it.
Then again, the second anyone involves a corperate lawyer, all creativity disappears preceeded by reason.
2600 argues that "no one in their right mind" would simply assume that Ford would put up such a domain name. They argue that "anyone in their right mind" would do a "whois" search to find out if Ford really put up the domain. Well, that's great that 2600 feels that comfortable with network technology. It's horrid that they have spent so much time in a small room together that they have forgotten that some people in this world have never heard of a "whois" search.
2600 has proven once again that they are a bunch of arogant punks. <p. BTW, don't ever buy a copy of their magazine; you would taint their philosophy. If you are a true 2600 sort of person, you have to find some way to make illegal copies of 2600 magazine. It's up to you if your solution is economically feasible.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The company is kind of going down hill in some areas while progressing in others.
Their R&D staff seems to be on top of things, only hindered by management.
Every since Ford started offering "same-sex rights" the company has started going down the toilet. Soon they've be on the same level as GM.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'd have to experiment to be sure, but I think the referer would be the page that linked to fuckgm.com, not fuckgm.com itself. That is, the referring page would be the one that was actually in the viewer's browser when the viewer clicked fuckgm.com. It wouldn't get changed by a simple redirect.
It might have been better just to add an entry to their HTTP config so that anyone sending a Host: header that was not one of their "accepted" domains gets sent to a "special" error page.
Probably would have been cheaper, too.
In the UK the "loser" pays the "winner" court costs. I used to think this was correct, but after seeing the US system in play, I don't think that. Having the risk of being liable for the other parties court costs discourages the little guy from filing suits. Yeah, it sucks that you are out of pocket, but imagine if you decided to sue McDonalds, for example, wouldn't you approach it with a different perception, if you knew you could end up with a bill for thousands of dollars of lawyers fees if you lost? Wouldn't you maybe think it just wasn't worth it, even if you thought you had a good case, but weren't sure?
They're not being asked to understand the underlying technology. They're being asked to understand the basic fundamentals. Anyone can create a link to any other page, for any reason. That's not like understanding the engine, that's like understanding what the turn signal means or what the brake pedal does, and is absolutely essential for any meaningful use of the web!
But as has been stated several times - they were choosing to do this. They could have blocked http requests originating via that domain name - I'm not managing a large corporate website, but even with my basic knowledge of Apache I could do that in a matter of minutes. They choose not too - therefore their motivations must have lied elsewhere.
What downfall? http://sorehands.com/ documented William Silverstein's legal battle to get worker's compensation from Microsystems/Learning Company/Mattel. He won a 6-figure settlement. They made a groundless libel counterclaim over his website, which was dismissed.
He's still taking them to court to get it dismissed with prejudice, so they cannot later decide to refile.