Ten years ago the Chicago Tribune took on a couple of fleaspecks with predictable results. The Trib had just introduced the adolescent tab it called RedEye to Chicago’s sagging newspaper market, and the market didn’t open its arms. The resistance was critical (“flaunts its inconsequence,” I wrote), competitive (The Sun-Times threw together a tab called Red Streak and shoved it out the door to sow confusion), economic (the 50 cents the Tribune originally asked turned out to be 50 cents more than anyone was willing to pay), and even legal. Or so it briefly seemed.
Last December the Occupy Chicago crowd rolled out the first issue of an occasional newspaper that they sassily call the Occupied Chicago Tribune. The name was chosen to make a point, which is that their “independent” paper would speak for the 99 percent who don’t run America, rather than the one percent who do. Similar papers launched in other cities included the Occupied Wall Street Journal, the Occupied Washington Times, the Occupied Boston Globe, and the Occupied Oakland Tribune.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Originally, Masters wanted the Occupiers to change the name of their newspaper. Then he dropped that demand and went after the domains. Michael Deutsch, a People’s Law Office attorney who’s helping Occupied Chicago Tribune deal with Masters’s complaint, asked me if I’d ever heard of the WIPO. I hadn’t. “I haven’t either,” said Deutsch. Now the Occupiers had just 20 days to file a response in Geneva that would impress an organization few of them had known existed and that eight times out of ten rules for the side complaining.
Masters argues otherwise: “Even if the Active Site were to parody or criticize Chicago Tribune (it does not), Respondent’s general right to free expression does not entitle Respondent to appropriate the CHICAGO TRIBUNE Mark in connection with such expression.”
A handful of WIPO’s administrative panelists are Chicago lawyers, and I talked to one of them. Most WIPO cases involve simple cybersquatting, said the panelist, which is why the complainant usually wins. If a case like that arises in Chicago, it wouldn’t matter if the panelist who decides it hails from Liverpool, or Canberra, or any other English-speaking part of the world. Or Chicago, for that matter. The issue would be cut and dried. But in cases with “First Amendment implications,” said the panelist, “the identification of the panelist might make a difference. A U.S. panelist is likely to pay some attention to those First Amendment rights.”
