June 26, 2003
Fox News vs Parody T-Shirt Site
Fox News Channel’s lawyers have issued a cease and desist letter to a Agitproperties, a website that sells parody t-shirts poking fun at the network. A press release issued by the website has the full letter of the C&D and rebuttal. The Register is also has the story and interview. So far Agitproperties has not removed merchandise from their site or displayed intent to comply with Fox’s request. The legal gambit may backfire on Fox since traffic (and presumably sales) are up dramatically and have reinvigorated the website’s owner:
“Our site has been up since last April and to be honest we were averaging a pathetic 2500 page hits a day, and were seriously thinking about ‘packing it in’ once our inventory ran out […] yesterday we logged 41,095 page hits, more in one 24-hour period than we have had since we went on line”Posted by Stephen VanDyke at June 26, 2003 04:29 PM
I find it hilarious that an organization as large as FoxNews is threatened by a small website averaging 2500 hits a day. And of course, rather then making them go away this just opens the floodgates. This is the best thing to happen to this site. And FoxNews has no case against them, because as they clearly point out in the middle of their homepage for all to see in case they didn’t already know, parody is protected under teh first amendment.
Or maybe FoxNews doesn’t think that the First Amendment is as important as the Second Amendment, order notwithstanding.
Posted by: blipsman at June 26, 2003 05:03 PM
