When did you stop beating your wife?

When will conservative media pundit Glenn Beck deny that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990?

There is no right answer to either question, but a satirical website dedicated to taking the Fox News commentator down a peg or two now finds itself on the wrong end of his attack lawyers.

glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com is getting some interesting nasty-grams from Beck’s legal representatives.

Understandably, Beck doesn’t find the website very funny. The site itself doesn’t make much of a pretense of sticking to the joke. The first bits of text that you read upon clicking through are hyperlinks to a disclaimer with anchor text reading “The Official Parody Website About The Controversy” and “Notice: This website is 100% parody”. After some text explaining that the authors don’t think Glenn Beck did, in fact, murder a young girl in 1990 but calling on him to deny the allegations anyway, the text directs the reader to the bottom of the page. Some (admittedly) smaller print there reads:

“Notice: This site is parody/satire. We assume Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990, although we haven’t yet seen proof that he didn’t. But we think Glenn Beck definitely uses tactics like this to spread lies and misinformation.

Read the last sentence again. That’s the point. Read it a third time and ignore the name of the site itself, because anyone who believes that we’re trying to actually get people to believe Glenn Beck raped and/or murdered is *whoosh* missing the entire point. So don’t be dumb like a lot of people are. I greatly expanded this text because so many people *read* it, and *still* didn’t understand.”

All of these taken together place the website pretty squarely in the realm of satire. In our media-saturated culture attacking the source of the news certainly seems to qualify as political speech. The role of Beck and other Fox News personalities in the political discourse makes them more susceptible to satire than politicians, not less. Rape and Murder are both serious crimes; arguably they are the worst possible offenses that a human being can commit. But there were probably more people fooled by the satirical Campari ad in the Hustler case than by this website. While the point the site’s authors are attempting to make might not be crystal clear to everyone who reads it, the lack of conviction as to the allegation’s truth should be.

The anonymous operator of the website is staring down a two-prong assault. On the one hand, Beck has an arguable defamation action against the site. But the more interesting aspect for me is the trademark question. According to Ars Technica, in addition to the usual legal posturing and torrent of threatening letters Beck’s attorneys have filed a case with the arbitration and mediation wing of the World Intellectual  Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. WIPO is the central battleground for these kind of disputes. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the body in charge of assigning domain names, but as it does so it operates within the context of an international intellectual property regime that has consistently moved toward greater and greater protection for rights holders. As a result, there is a natural tension at work between protecting the interests of the first to register a domain name and delivering robust protection for trademark holders. If two parties dispute the registration of a domain name, ICANN requires that registrants submit to an arbitration procedure descriptively called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). The consent to the administrative proceeding is a mandatory part of registering a domain name, and that is uniform across all registrars, even the ones who registered the Glenn Beck parody website.

Beck’s argument will be that the site’s url contains the name “Glenn Beck” which he is in the the process of registering as a trademark. As such, the domain name infringes on his trademark. Under U.S. trademark law, this claim has some problems. For infringement of federally registered marks, the Lanham Act requires that the accused use be “in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution or advertising of any goods or services” in a context that is likely to cause confusion, mistake or deception. Lanham Act § 32(1). The fact that the operators of the Glenn Beck website aren’t selling anything and don’t have any advertising present on their page. The website functions more like a gripe site, which is speech generally protected by the First Amendment. But the UDRP process doesn’t have to follow American trademark law and for a variety of reasons it’s decisions are heavily skewed in favor of complainants like Beck. Free speech won’t be a factor, and the discussion is likely to focus much more on the commercial sphere.

But Glenn Beck is a prominent broadcaster and best-selling author as well as the poster boy for right  wing talk radio who has had popular shows on both CNN and Fox News. He is also a youtube sensation. He is not a private citizen and whether he likes it or not his name has become part of a larger conversation. So why he shouldn’t he accept this website (and other parodies) as part of the cost of doing business as a public figure and get on with his chalkboard conspiracy theories?

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