Tough times for parody
NY Daily News
Robert Cox
A cyber-gadfly, hit with a copyright-infringement charge by The New York Times, yesterday stripped his Web site of a Times parody and watched it pop up elsewhere online.
At issue is the devilishly realistic Times "Columnist Corrections" page that Robert Cox created for his site, TheNationalDebate.com ("Where Policy, Politics and the Media Meet").
Though dated "February 30," Cox's "Corrections" looks like a page from NYTimes.com and indeed "corrects," in a Timesian manner, perceived factual lapses in Times op-ed columns.
One Cox correction challenges columnist David Brooks' assertion that the Democratic Party "won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower." Cox also questions columnist Paul Krugman's use of economic data and a government report on Medicare.
"Your actions are deliberately designed to confuse people and are clearly illegal," Times copyright counsel Nancy Richman scolded Cox in a letter that, of course, he posted on his site.
Richman insisted that Cox "remove the page from public display immediately."
Worse for Cox, his Internet service provider Verio, which also heard from The Times, told him it would suspend his account today if the offending material was not removed.
Before that could happen, Cox pulled the "Corrections" from his site - at 4:05 yesterday afternoon - but listed where in the sympathetic, so-called "blogosphere" it could now be found.
Cox, 40, a self-described Internet entrepreneur and lifelong Times reader in Westchester, said he doesn't have the bucks or legal resources to argue that "Corrections" is a parody.
But "the real issue," Cox believes, is that The Times' op-ed page has a more casual standard than the news pages when it comes to errors.
Times editorial page editor Gail Collins told the Daily News, "The [op-ed] columnists are expected to do their own corrections, but that doesn't mean they aren't expected to correct every error."
Collins added that columnists were previously allowed to experiment, weaving some corrections into the body of columns, but corrections now should run at the bottom of columns. |
