FC: Satire web sites aren't a worry yet, Commerce Dept concludes

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41293,00.html

   Satirists Didn't Steal Election
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   2:00 a.m. Jan. 19, 2001 PST

   WASHINGTON -- From gwbush.com to hillary200.org, last year's election
   was a boom time for political parodists.

   It also led to a law, which President Clinton signed in November 1999,
   demanding that the Commerce Department promptly investigate whether
   such tongue-in-cheek humor confuses Americans and "disrupts the
   electoral process."

   Nope. It doesn't. No worries at all. Those were the results the
   administration released late Thursday, with just one day left before
   Clinton leaves office.

   An announcement from the Patent and Trademark Office, part of the
   Commerce Department, concludes in typically understated bureaucratese
   that there's no pressing need for "a centralized accurate list of
   official candidates and potential candidates" for public office.

   The report's reasoning isn't as much principled as practical: How
   would such a system work? Who would maintain the master list of
   government-approved websites? What about existing websites that
   already use a politician's name?

   [...]




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