Steal This v. Stealth Is: Community Technology Collective Bullied Over Misreading of URL
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Steal This v. Stealth Is: Community Technology Collective Bullied Over Misreading of URL
The InterActivist Network is an all-volunteer collective which provides free technology infrastructure and services to community groups and activists in New York City. InterActivist is based out of ABC No Rio, a community arts center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and shares server bandwidth with Autonomedia, a small press publisher in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
InterActivist Network provides free email accounts to community groups and activists under the domain name StealThisEmail.com. The domain name was chosen as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Abbie Hoffman, as well as to a defunct local pirate radio station, Steal This Radio.
This week, Autonomedia, which registered the domain name, received a 30-page cease-and-desist letter from Leo Stoller of rentamark.com. Mr. Stoller claims to be the rightful owner of all right, title and interest in and to the mark "Stealth".
"We're a negative-profit free service for our community. In the past we have been attacked by politically motivated hackers. We've learned to expect a lot of grief, but we never expected someone to come after us because he thinks we are using a word that he says he owns, and a word that we are not even using," said Eric Goldhagen, a member of the InterActivist Network.
"Apparently Leo Stoller imagines that it is possible to misread the url as 'Stealth is Email,' which may be anagramically possible, but makes no sense except perhaps as the first line in a depressing technology haiku. Nonetheless, Mr. Stoller is demanding that we immediately turn over the domain name to him," explained InterActivist member Amanda Hickman.
InterActivist and Autonomedia have no intention of complying with Stoller's patently absurd demand.
According to a search of domain names at Netcraft, there are 76 domains with "StealThis" in their URL. It is unknown at this time how many of those domains' owners have been similarly threatened by Mr. Stoller.
"After we got over the initial panic, we did some research on the net. We found out that we are not alone in being threatened by Leo Stoller," said Nat Meysenburg, a member of InterActivist.
One person who received a similarly threatening letter from Mr Stoller has registered the domain StealThat.com to alert people about Mr. Stoller's actions.
"We were excited to find stealthat.com. Getting some background from others in a similar position was really helpful; it's a great example of the mutual aid that can be found on the internet," continued Meysenburg
Jim Fleming of Autonomedia commented, "We publish some titles that we allow people to pirate, and sometimes we provide the full text of our books online for people to download for free. We allow others to make non-profit uses of some of our work all the time. It is outrageous that someone would try to take StealThisEmail.com from us over his supposed ownership of a word that appears by unintended coincidence in that URL."
We are alarmed that Mr. Stoller has a reputation for intimidating companies and individuals into complying with his demands, as documented by the 27 pages of supporting materials he included in his cease-and-desist letter.
In these (thus far unverified) documents, Mr. Stoller purports to demonstrate that corporations such as JVC, Panasonic and K-Mart have capitulated to his demands to avoid protracted legal battles.
Notable legal and PR firms such as Cramer-Krasselt and Fulbright & Jaworski assure Stoller that, while they believe that his accusations are "completely without merit," they or their clients will obliterate the term "stealth" from their websites, vocabularies and/or URLs.
Curiously omitted is any indication that Mr. Stoller has taken on Northrop Grumman, which continues to manufacture and advertise their B-2 stealth bomber.
The InterActivist collective and the few dozen local activists who check their email at StealThisEmail.com like the domain name and don't plan to capitulate so quickly, especially given the utter baselessness of Mr. Stoller's claims.
"We will continue to use the domain and plan to fight any further attempts to shut us down," concluded Goldhagen.
For more information:
Eric Goldhagen
eric@interActivist.net
Jim Fleming
jim@autonomedia.org
Leo Stoller
773-283-3880
