What I find the most laughable, in a malignant and quaint way, is the subtle alteration of the actual facts in their press release.
Paragraph one, with the exception of the self-touting, which should put one on guard, looks accurate enough.
Paragraph 2; ...submitted a press release to Business Wire on behalf of a company called ''Webnode''... omits the possibly salient fact that there is no such company as "webnode" per the standard definition of "company"; WebNode is a parody of a real company...it does not actually exist as a company, it exists only as a joke. BW's use of the word "sham" is remarkable; a sham is "a trick or fraud, an imitation meant to deceive"; [Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary] so it appears that BW has first called something that is not an actual company a company, and then further identified it as being not a company.
What is most curious about Paragraph 2 is the absence of the date of the Press Release in question, which happens to be April 1, 1999... a rather significant piece of missing information to anyone who has no prior knowledge of the dispute.
Pargraph 3 has a subtle twist, the assertion is that the website contained a "fake solicitation for investments" when the more proper wording might be 'a solicitation for fake investments'...the solicitation was quite real; the "investment" was imaginary.
Paragraph 4 is amusing in a dark way. ...The defendants responded to inquiries about Webnode and collected personal information from nearly 2,000 people... I cannot imagine how BW would know there were responses, primarily because the statement it is false. It appears that BW has assumed that the "investor information which was asked for on the website was actually collected. This remains to be seen, and I personally doubt if BW can prove their allegation.
Once again, the thrust of the paragraph is to portray the "defendants" as cold and calculating "bad guys" by both the language and assertions that BW could not possibly have evidence for.
The writer of the press release goes on in Paragraph 5 to press his or her point home, calling the defendants the Webnode "crew". The intent of this choice of words to describe the three pranksters is obvious. Additionally, I'm curious as to what BW means by "assurances that the press release was genuine". I don't know what their contract states, but I have a strong suspicion that if it were worded strongly that the person that submits the press release is somehow legally guaranteeing its complete validity, there would be considerably less business for BW than there is.
Paragraph 6 appears semi-accurate, I suppose, if BW has some way of tracking how many people actually saw the release on the Webnode site. The subtle twist here is that BW seems to be complaining that the phony website was responsible for "millions of views" when it seems more probable that the original press release has a greater readership than the reproduction on the website.
Again, I am curious how BW has access to the number of hits the Webnode site received, or if they are simply saying 'the information was put on the Internet and so potentially could have possibly been observed by millions of people'. The rather amusing part of this is that the material they are in a huff about was written by the "Webnode Crew", not by BW. BW, it appears, is asserting that the material (which could, for all they know, be copyrighted by the writer) is somehow damaging due to the fact that it is "false", when they have already conceded that the website and the "company" are a joke.
Paragraph 7 also has some interesting omissions. Their demand that their trademark be removed from the website was complied with the next day, April 2, 1999.
Paragraph 8 is funny. After complying with BW's demands, the defendants, according to BW, ...then began making false assertions that the company was itself involved in fraudulent investment schemes...
I looked, I really did, and I don't see it. It is curious to me why BW would even take this tack. Is BW trying to show intent? If they are, they certainly didn't do their homework. The "defendants" have a long and quite visible history of publicly exposing shams. All three appear to be quite versed in how to tell the truth from fiction, and I couldn't find any examples where they even got something wrong, let alone published something false on purpose.
If BW is trying to present a covert argument for some sort of bad intention on the part of the "defendants", BW's omission of the April Fool's Gag angle and their twisting of the obvious facts seem to me to me to weaken their claim at best.
Paragraph 9, the lawsuit alleges ...violations of federal and state trademark laws, fraud, breach of contract, defamation and conspiracy and seeks unspecified damages and injunctive relief...
I assume the violations of federal and state trademark laws refers to the "Bidness Wire" thing. Seems really weak to me. Parody is covered quite clearly in the law.
Fraud? The legal definitiion as I understand it is: "any misrepresentation of truth or a fact used to take money, rights, etc. away from a person or persons."
BW collected a fee for the press release. One day later, their trademark was removed from the offending article per their own admission. The Webnode site was an April Fool's gag, there is no company, there are no "nodes", it's all phony, no money changed hands, no rights were offered or taken away. It was, and is, a JOKE. The argument that there was some sort of fraud involved is not only convoluted, it is bizarre.
Defamation? That's slander and libel. Obviously no slander, what about libel. I see no libel. None. I believe that libel, legally, must be both false and premeditated. In other words, the guilty party must be proven to have had the intention to write something that is false about the injured party, and then be proven to actually have done so. I also believe that the best defense against libel is proving that what you wrote is true.
But first, one must have some evidence that something was actually written at all, let alone the intention and the falsity.
Conspiracy? I guess if you want to say there was a conspiracy to pull off an April Fool's gag, you could go with this. What possible bad effect an April Fool's gag might have had on BW seems greatly overshadowed by their own press release, which reads more like a news story in Weekly World News than a press release.
And there just happen to be a couple of other facts that BW left out of their story. It appears that weeks after the gag, BW called in the FBI. I kid you not. Like the Federal Bureau of Investigation should be on this. That's comical. It actually just makes me wonder if BW has something to hide.
Lastly, they failed to mention that there were two April Fool's Day gags by the same "conspirators". Two gags on the same day, instead of the one the year before and the one the year before that. I see a pattern here.
The other gag, www.FunPhone.com, had no BW press release.
Maybe that's why they missed it.
Long live the Bill of Rights.
TLC
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