Geoffrey VanderPal, 2006’s biggest loser

So I haven’t blogged in weeks, months, and what finally pulls me out of lassitude?  Good ol’ Geoffrey VanderPal, a candidate in Nevada’s 2006 elections, who just can’t let go of the fact that while running for office, his campaign authorized a newspaper ad full of spelling and grammatical errors.  You know how Flippy loves a good spelling error (she’s always correcting me), so of course she jumped on the ad and posted a marked up copy of it in her blog, pointing out where it needed corrections.  VanderPal has spent the last four years hounding Flippy to remove the offending blog entry—sometimes he begs and pleads in email, sometimes he offers veiled threats about the preponderance of “personal information” Flippy provides on her blog, and sometimes he pays money to companies like Reputation Defender to get them to foul up the Internet with repetitive spam designed to bury Flippy’s blog entry in the search results.  Google still loves quality, however, so Flippy’s ancient blog post sits at the top of the rankings, thus “rankling” Mr. Geoff.  His most recent tactic has been to file DMCA complaints to force our hosting company to remove the image of the old ad that Flippy included with her blog.  I’m sure he hired someone to file the complaints on his behalf, so he can sit at home and wring his hands and count the letters after his name and claim that he had nothing to do with the filing… he’s getting pretty easy to figure out.  I’m actually going through the process of filing a DMCA counter-notice, because Flippy’s use of the ad is protected free political speech under “Fair Use” allowances made for in the DMCA (Under the fair use doctrine, it is not an infringement to use the copyrighted works of another in some circumstances, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, or educational use).  From everything I’ve read, the First Amendment is specifically geared towards protecting political discussions, and I’m quite happy to take the opportunity to challenge the notion that a person providing a critique of publicly-available materials can’t display or quote the item being discussed.  Is VanderPal’s unsuccessful campaign old news?  Sure it is.  The unsuccessful political campaigns of Donald Gurewitz are old news, too, but you don’t see him wandering around the Internet, trying to make himself invisible.

On a related note, if you suffer an annoying little mosquito bite, just ignore it and eventually it will fade away.  If you scratch at it and irritate it, it will only grow bigger and last longer.  Sheesh.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/22 at 01:07 AM

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