While we’re on the subject of rants (a real rarity here at the Underground), we’d like to point out it’s not exactly been a great decade for the PR departments of most corporations (the financial industry recently brought the world economy to its knees, and if you haven’t looked to the Southeast USA lately, you’ve missed the specter of BP work crews burning oil-covered sea turtles alive).

In that environment you’d think corporations would be careful about acting like bullying assholes (are you listening Nestle?), but ahh – you’d think wrong.

Bamboo fly rod builder Jerry Foster received what any sentient being would describe as a threatening, bullying, wholly disrespectful letter from Lockheed-Martin’s lawyer, who apparently attended multiple sessions of “Being a Massive Corporate Bully 101″ while in law school.

When Foster decided to build his own web site (clearly a do-it-yourselfer), he thought long and hard about a domain name, choosing ‘SkunkworksFlyRods.com.’

The skunkworks reference was his homage to the idea of geek types working without interference from fools, marketing and management – an apt description of any number of bamboo rod builders.

I have to point out that Foster’s site makes maximum use of obsolete, slow-loading technology, and will draw the bare minimum of passing web traffic.

All of which apparently meant nothing to the above-mentioned attorney, whose form letter includes warm, fuzzy passages like:

“Here, it appears your use of the Skunkworksflyrods.com domain is in bad faith, and is an attempt to profit off the goodwill of the Skunk Works trademark as you have created a false affiliation, connection, or association between your website and Lockheed Martin, and you have potentially misdirected the unwitting public to your website away from Lockheed Martin’s official Skunk Works website.”

Of course. I mean, there’s a real risk someone headed to Lockheed-Martin’s “skunk works” site for nuclear ICBMs to destroy Iowa will mistakenly end up with a stack of largely non-lethal bamboo fly rods instead.

There’s more:

“On behalf of Lockheed Martin, we hereby demand that you immediately cease and desist from any and all use of skunkworksflyrods.com. We also demand that you take immediate steps to assign and transfer the domain name to Lockheed Martin by XXXX, thereby relinquishing all rights therein.”

Demand This

I understand the concept of protecting intellectual property. I even understand they need to protect their trademark – or lose the right to do so later.

What I don’t understand is the kind of threatening crap evidenced in the letter above. Why not something that doesn’t immediately put the recipient in a place of hating you?

Ms. Boisineau, didn’t your mother teach you any manners at all?

You know, why not a letter starting with: “Hey, your site’s cool and all, but we need to talk.”

Then there are the “demands” that Foster immediately transfer the name to them, with no mention of paying him for the domain reg fees.

Turns out, they do this kind of thing all the time, even earning a nasty note in Wikipedia:

They have filed several challenges against registrants of domain names containing variations on the term under anti-cybersquatting policies, and have lost a case under the .uk domain name dispute resolution service against a company selling cannabis seeds and paraphernalia, which used the word “skunkworks” in its domain name (referring to “Skunk”, a variety of the cannabis plant). Lockheed Martin claimed the company registered the domain in order to disrupt its business and that consumer confusion might result. The respondent company argued that Lockheed “used its size, resources and financial position to employ ‘bullyboy’ tactics against . . . a very small company.”

OK.

It’s likely that Foster’s going to eventually lose this one, being as Lockheed-Martin has a largely inexhaustible supply of your tax dollars to invest beating a bamboo fly rod builder into the dirt.

Still – in an homage to Lockheed Martin’s (and their legal firm’s) poor manners – I just registered “skunkworkssucks.com.”

They’ll enjoy that.

As for the Undergrounders, any legal eagles with intellectual property experience able to offer up some advice – as in would “skunkwerxflyrods.com” fly under the cybersquatting radar?

Any other ideas?

I realize this is a lot of words for a small gig, but you don’t have to listen to the news very long these days to get a little tired of the whole corporate bullying thing.

See you in court, Tom Chandler.

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