Wordpress Dumps Funky Winkerbean-Focused Sites After Letter?

If I'm reading this correctly, the owner of two sites commenting in satirical fashion on Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean claims in an astonishing post that the cartoonist used a legal representative to inquire after the site with its previous host, Wordpress, and that this inquiry forced its migration. He publishes the letter in the post, which was directed from a law firm to Wordpress owner Automattic Media. The person being inquired after further states that fear of having to defend himself legally may lead to changes in how he runs those sites. None of my e-mails on the matter have been returned, and I post this partly in hope some of them will be, or even that people I haven't reached at all might contact me and maybe take a few questions. My first take on the matter is that I'm not sure on what basis other than the "you really don't want to mess with the hassle" angle these claims as to trademark infringement are being made, although I'm also largely unfamiliar with the satirical sites in question and how they conceivably might have employed elements of the strip in ways other than standard parody or commentary. The whole thing's a head scratcher, actually, and the principles being challenged would seem to me to have dire consequences for satire and commentary generally, sites like The Comics Curmudgeon.
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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