A friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous posted a pretty cool April Fool’s site called GoogleCircles that purported to be a new Google service that showed you what people in your physical or logical domain were searching for. The joke was that if you clicked on whitehouse.gov, you’d see that they’re searching for WMD’s, etc.

Google has sent him a cease and desist order, citing the DMCA. My friend has given me permission to blog the following chronology.

1. I came up with the idea around the first week of March and I registered the domain googlecircles.com soon afterwards.

2. The last week of March I purchased a hosting plan from ServerBeach, because friends, as well as my company have been very happy with them from a customer service perspective. Before they set up my server, ServerBeach called me and asked me a bunch of questions about what I was going to use the site for. Are you going to use it for bulk email, file sharing, music swapping, spam? No questions about why the word “Google” appeared in the name.

3. I launched the site on 3/31.

4. Several sites picked up on the joke and it got good, not exceptional traffic. I think it was a success, given that 4/1 was a Saturday this year.

5. On 4/4 the technical contact at the DNS, ServerBeach, and I (via domainsbyproxy) all received email from Google saying cease-and-desist. Google’s mail to me said I had 10 days to reply. ServerBeach sent me mail saying the site had to be removed in 24 hours or they’d terminate my account.

6. You heard that right. Although it may be the case that no human being at Google has looked into this and that this is a robo-filing that happens when Google’s index discovers a domain with the letters “G O O G L E” in the name, ServerBeach is willing to terminate a customer account based on the *allegation* of trademark infringement.

7. When I wrote to ServerBeach saying “um, well, you see, I answered Google already and pointed out that I wasn’t infringing, yada yada yada”, they replied with “we will contact them ourselves, you have to resolve this in 24 hours.”

8. Needless to say, I have not heard back from Google (I have no idea how long they take to reply, but since they gave *me* 10 days I wouldn’t expect this to be quick) and so I am preparing for the worst. I am also assuming I will have to transfer my company’s IT infrastructure ($2500/mo) away from ServerBeach, since I can’t host it at a company that would disregard its customers so cavalierly.

9. The legal notices are posted at www.googlecircles.com, replacing the original hack.

10. The original hack is still available from Google’s cache; a fact which I find highly amusing. Does this mean that Google has not et responded to its own DMCA demand?

11. A friend just sent me a link to a Valleywag item which contrasts Google’s disclaimer about their own 4/1 gag with their response to mine. I guess they stumbled across the DMCA notices I posted.

And all of this, of course, ought to be mooted by the fact that what I did was non-commercial, non-malicious, protected parody speech that caused no economic damage to Google or its brand. And hopefully it was funny, too! :-) [Tags: google]

Categories: Uncategorized dw