Wired News story today on the sad fate of parody site DontBuyMusic.com, forced offline by a lawyergram last Friday:
The website, created by the online community Macteens, spoofed the BuyMusic.com website by using the same format as the original site but rewriting the text and redirecting all clicks to the Apple iTunes website. ITunes and BuyMusic.com are both online paid music services. DontBuyMusic.com last week brought attention to the marked similarities between TV commercials for iTunes and BuyMusic (see the ads here and here).
Macteens server master Clark Mueller said Macteens did not receive any direct communication from BuyMusic's lawyers. Instead, the counsel for Direct Response Network and its affiliated companies, including BuyMusic.com and Buy.com, sent an e-mail that reached DontBuyMusic's host, datahive. Though datahive said it had no intention of removing dontbuymusic.com from its servers, Mueller — claiming responsibility for most of the changes to the spoof page's code — elected to take to the site down. "I think that the copyright and trademark acts may not even apply to us," he said. "But I'm not sure — I'm not a lawyer and I can't afford one."
Link, Discuss
