Liberal Party of Canada Sues Satire Website

Geekboy writes "Arguing proprietary interests, the Liberal Party of Canada has set out to force the closing (article mirrored in case the site closes) of a satire web site that takes aim at the new unelected Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin. The site in question is paulmartintime.ca, which is a satire of paulmartintimes.ca, but this opens a whole can of worms in regards to copyright and fair use of web content, and it involves the controlling party of Canada. Clearly there are mixed messages when one site mimics another, but where does one draw the line when it involves political satire and accountability?"

Comments

If i was judge

[LittleBigLui]

my verdict would be:

The plaintiff can now choose between either

1. dropping the charges and being allowed to keep the word "liberal" in his name.

2. changing his name so there's no "liberal" in there and keep up the charges.

In case 1, the charges are dropped and the defendant is free to keep the site up.

In case 2, since there won't be any liberal party to parody anymore, the defendants site now is entirely fictional and can be kept, too.

If only i was judge. And canadian, too.

Satire or not...

[Drakin]

It looks like everyone's in the wrong on this.

The webmaster of the real site shouldn't have gotten involved. He found the site, he should refer it to the lawyers. (he likely also found the site by misstyping his own URL)

The owners of the "satire" site should know better. they're useing a domain that is off by one easy typo, using a deceptively similar site design. It's not truely a satire site at all, but a site that's a collection of anti Paul Martin stories, and while such a site is fully legal, the manner of which they chose to display it, is probably not.

(by now, this is probably redundant though)

Re:While

[Lord Kano]

While I don't have a problem with this satire website, they are clearly cyber squatting.

Bullshit. Cybersquatting was when people would register domain names because someone would probably want it one day. Like when some asshole registered JuliaRoberts.com and tried to sell it to the real Julia Roberts at a huge profit.

There is nothing wrong with picking a similar URL for the purposes to political satire. As long as you're not trying to mislead people into thinking that you're the satired party's official representative, there is no problem, morally, ethically, or legally(at least here in the US, and yes I know we're talking about Canada, but like it or not what is now the internet is largely of American origin).

It's a very underhanded approach to getting your message out, and is completely inappropriate, regardless of legality.

Why is it underhanded? Because people can't type?

I have no doubt that many of the visitors to the site find it by accident, but so what? When experts-exchange originally registered www.ExpertSexChange.com (capitalization added for effect), I'm sure that many people misunderstood what they were all about. They changed it to keep people from laughing at them, not because of a moral or ethical dilemma.

There is no problem with this.

LK