Pacifica v. first amendment.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Citings - Copyright case - Brief Article

By now it's common for critics of particular corporations to create Web sites that lay out their case. It's also common, unfortunately, for the targeted business to respond with a legal threat, alleging that such sites violate the company's trademark.

Now the habit seems to have spread into the nonprofit sector. On February 15, lawyers representing the Pacifica radio network, which used to bill itself as "free speech radio," wrote to four dissident sites--freewpwf.org (named for the network's D.C. station), wbai.net (named for the New York station), wbaifree.org, and savepacifica.net--telling them to get off the Web or face legal action.

At issue: structural changes in the way Pacifica operates and the editorial direction of the network. At the core of the network are five radio stations owned by the Pacifica Foundation; additionally, there are some 60 "affiliate" stations around the country that run Pacifica programming.

Sounding more like hired mouthpieces for a Fortune 500 firm than attorneys for a leftist radio network, Pacifica's lawyers told the wbai.net folks that "Appropriate action will be taken against you to enjoin your use of the domain name and retrieve the domain name from you. We will also consider seeking temporary, preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, as well as damages for the harm suffered and which continues to be suffered by our client, together with attorney fees because of the wrongful deprivation caused by your illegal use of our client's registered trademark and trade name.

At press time, wbaifree.org has temporarily shut down, while the others remain active; all four plan to fight the network if it brings them to court.

The Pacifica Foundation was established by anarchists and pacifists in 1946, and its first station went on the air in 1949. In the years since, it gradually moved toward a more conventionally leftist posture, but it still had room for diverse ideological fare. (Even National Review had a Pacifica show for a while, in the early '60s.)

Over the past 10 years, though, the network's management has been trying to gentrify its stations, aiming for the niche formerly filled by the increasingly centrist National Public Radio.

To that end, it has canceled eccentric...