Websites of SOPA-supporting congressmen redirect to Protest SOPA

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61 points·peterzakin··9 comments

I don't think this is a good idea it's almost certainly passing off [1] which is illegal.

Not to mention confusing.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off

I don't think it can be passing-off without goods or services being involved. There's probably some tort here, though...

As a political protest, this would likely be protected speech. Free speech is after all supposed to be the rule, not the exception. I am surprised though that a professional politician and his staff could be so out of touch with the web that they never registered their names as domain names.

You can just append "?banner=none" to the URL to prevent the banner from appearing. The mobile version is annoying.

Couldn't this confuse people into thinking that those congresspeople don't support SOPA?

This was my first reaction. People visiting the web and seeing all kinds of SOPA/PIPA hate, now will automatically assume these same guys support SOPA.

Better would be to redirect them to a page that says, THIS GUY SUPPORTS SOPA/PIPA.

Best would probably be to not squat on the domains.

This is:

(a) unimpressive, because it's obvious that you went and registered a bunch of domains with a version of their name that they don't use (christopher, benjamin, melvin, middle initial, etc), and

(b) a bad idea, because at best it's lulz for geeks in the know, but at worst it's "SOPA opponents have gone too far: they hacked web sites of the U.S. government!"

Lose it.

ftr, I didn't do it. But I do think it's smirk-worthy. To each his own.

This page has been taken down. edit- at least that is what I am seeing when I try.

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