Web site hosting for anybody: $10/month and up
Threatening letters to people who satirize you, hoping they won’t know the law: $500
Reputation as giant corporation required to intimidate small publishers: $billions
Supreme court decisions protecting parody and satire from accusations of copyright and trademark infringement… Priceless
There are some rights money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard’s lawyers.

Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:30:01 -0700
From: Declan McCullagh
To:
Subject: FC: Humorless Mastercard lawyers threaten rec.humor.funny newsgroup

Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:22:19 -0600 (MDT)
From: David Butterfield
Subject: Mastercard vs. RHF
To:

Fom (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Subject: Mastercard threatens rec.humor.funny over satire
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 19:30:00 PDT

Two years ago, rec.humor.funny published a sick satire of the Mastercard
“Priceless” ads (There are some things money can’t buy, for everything
else there’s Mastercard) based around the Columbine tragedy. I won’t repeat
it here, since it was pretty sick and offensive, though you can find it
on the web site at:

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Apr/columbine.html

Today we received a “cease and desist” letter from Mastercard’s lawyers
demanding that the parody be removed from our web site, falsely claiming
it violates their trademarks and copyrights, in spite of the well
established rules protecting satire and parody from such attacks.

The letter can be found at

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/price.html

Here, however, is my response…