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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.
""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
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..
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.]
> Why is 2600 saying "Shove it!" to GM, though? I
> can't figure that part out.
They registered the domain name with the intention of making a site to bitch about GM.
They didn't have any content yet, so they pointed it to Ford until they got more organized.
Once Ford started legal proceedings, they almost had to keep that address pointing at Ford, anything else would have been seen as backing down.
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
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.
The wonderful thing about 2600 cases is that the worst that can happen is they throw Goldstein et. al. in the slammer which given that they appear to have the personality of the Grouch in Sesame street (being anoyed makes me happy) I suspect they would really, really enjoy...
I don't much care if 2600 can't point 'fuckxyz' at Ford. But I do care about the various deep linking cases.
The sheer eggregiousness of the 2600 case made it a pretty good test case. If 2600 lost the risk of collateral damage to serious deep linking would be minimal. If they win, well if you can point fuck at someone then you can probably point most anything.
The downside being that it was a pretty risky case that could easilly have backfired. 2600 made a really good target for the MPAA in the DeCSS case. My concern about this case was that they might easily have got a Reagan appointee conservative judge who might well have made an idiotic rulling because he disliked the 2600 people trying to turn a court case into performance art.
I had been asked to give expert testimony in the case but could not because Ford's legal people had added my employer in as a defendant in yet another case.
I suspect that the basic problem is that either the Ford lawyers are fundamentally incompetent or an incompetent manager insisted on a lawsuit. Starting a law suit in an untested area of law is a pretty stupid first recourse if your interest is to solve a problem. It is possible that Ford really wanted to have this area of law settled, but I doubt it.
It is the cases like this one that led to the charges for domain names in the first place. Until people started to file lawsuits registration was free.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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
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