Mocking Heads

I won't add anything else to this besides stating that Glen Beck deserves every horrible thing that happens to him, and I hope that the worse it is, the more agonizing and slow it is for him to suffer through.

When someone registers a domain like glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com, they probably expect to hear from Glenn Beck's lawyers In this case, it took two days. The site's anonymous operator says that the whole thing is satire — but that may not be enough to avoid charges of defamation.

The controversy started a week ago in the Fark forums, where someone picked up on an old Gilbert Gottfried roast of the "comedian" Bob Saget. During the roast, Gottfried repeatedly said (in this video) that Saget had "not raped and killed a girl in 1990." The Fark forums took the joke about the power of insinuation and applied it to right-wing talk show host Glenn "Obama is a racist" Beck.

One of the Fark readers then took the forum meme to the next level, registering a domain name and launching a web site in order to make a point about talking head TV demagoguery. "Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?" asks the site. "We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990—in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?" At the very bottom of the page was a small text disclaimer saying that the site was satirical.

The anonymous owner of the site admitted that launching it "just felt right" — it flipped the "birther" non-falsifiable conspiracy theories about Obama's birth and citizenship around and applied the same tactics to one of the biggest talking heads (no pun intended?) on cable news. It's just "using Beck's tactics against him" and is a small way of "directing all this frustration" with Beck and others into action.

The site went up on September 1 and had a huge spike of initial interest—it served more than 120,000 page loads in the first 24 hours. By September 3, lawyers for Beck's media company, Mercury Radio Arts, had contacted the domain registrar demanding that the "highly defamatory domain name" glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com be deleted, that the WhoisGuard privacy protection service be revoked, and that the owner's contact information be turned over to the lawyers.

Registrar NameCheap didn't do this, of course, and Beck's lawyers sent another letter the next day, making the same demands. They also showed that they were reading the website: "We also note that it appears you contacted the individual, as he states on his website hosted on the Defamatory Domain that 'my webhost is taking some flak over this website, so if he gets shuts me down, it may take a bit to get rehosted.'"

The registrar did change the site's nameservers without alerting the owner, but allowed him to change them back once he contacted the company, and the site remains up. The owner also registered additional backup domains, such as "DidGlennBeckRapeAndMurderAYoungGirlIn1990.com" (form of a question!) and "gb1990.com" (inoffensive!). Beck's lawyers also filed a case with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Switzerland, the group which handles the worldwide domain dispute resolution process, on the grounds that the new website was improperly using Glenn Beck's trademarked name.

(Side note: Beck's name is in the process of being trademarked in the US. While most of the "goods and services" associated with the name are obvious ones like DVDs and books containing Beck's special brand of commentary, the mark is also reserved for use on "cups, ice buckets, mugs, non-metal piggy banks, ceramic and porcelain holiday ornaments." The thought of such an ornament hanging on a Christmas tree...)

Paul Levy of Public Citizen routinely stands up for Web users who complain about (or otherwise antagonize) deep-pocketed corporate interests, but when asked him about the site and the defamation complaints, he was happy to stay seated in his chair. The Communications Decency Act basically protects registrars and web hosts from liability for the content that people put up using such services, so the letters to the registrar aren't so much a legal threat as an attempt to get the website owner's contact info without a subpoena. And the trademark claims made at WIPO? Levy thinks they sound "preposterous."

But the possibility of a US defamation/libel suit against the anonymous site operator is a real one. Certainly, domain names alone "can be defamatory," Levy says, pointing out that the first iteration of the site posed the "rape and murder" claim as a statement—not as a question. Levy says that such a statement is only actionable if 1) it's false (and we're quite sure it is) and 2) it was stated with actual malice. That last bit could be tricky to prove, especially in a case involving an anonymous speaker, but Levy makes clear that the site might well be on the wrong side of a very fine line.

"I don't think 'Ha ha it's a joke' at the end gets you off," he says; if the parodic information is defamatory, it's risky for the defendant in such cases. That's complicated by the fact that the original domain name made the allegedly defamatory claim against Beck—and of course no one stumbling across the site in a search engine or elsewhere would see any disclaimer. In such cases, the domain name itself is a standalone piece of content; the disclaimer may help regarding the website content, but it won't necessarily transfer a cone of protection to the domain name as well.

Corynne McSherry, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, chose the same word to describe the WIPO domain name dispute process: "preposterous." But she's less convinced that Beck's lawyers have a case to make regarding defamation, even when it comes to the website's name. "I'm not sure of any case where someone has claimed that a domain name was defamatory," she said. And while domain names do pop up alone in search engines and other places, the public generally thinks of a site's name in connection with the full content of the site, not as some standalone morsel of content.

While acknowledging that the name is "pretty dramatic," she notes that this is often part of the point of parody—to highlight perceived outrageous behavior in one's opponents by upping the ante (think, for instance, of Jonathan Swift's vicious satire "A Modest Proposal" in which he proposes that the Irish poor make money by selling their children to the wealthy... as food). In McSherry's analysis, the site is "pure political criticism and there's nothing wrong with that."

When asking the site's owner whether he thought, on a human/moral level, if the joke had gone to far, there was a pause. "Would i do something like this to any random human being?" he says. "No way, of course not." But the site is intended as a parody and Beck is a public figure...

Will the site change any TV talking head tactics? The anonymous owner admits that it probably won't, but he says that the site "feels important to do." It "served as that release valve of frustration" for people angered by the tactics of talk show hosts. And yet, he had a moment of pause when someone wrote in to him saying that she had been raped as a young girl and that she found the site grotesque rather than humorous or insightful.

No lawsuit has yet been filed, and it's not clear how far Beck's lawyers will take the matter. Unless the site owner responds to the WIPO domain dispute, however, he will lose the original domain. On the site forums, readers are already thinking of ways to extend the satire. "Glenn Beck hosts a daily radio show from 9am-noon," wrote one. "I think we should begin calling and asking why he refuses to address his alleged rape and murder of a young girl in 1990... If you do call in, please record and upload, so we can share his answers (or lack there of) with the world."