Sarah Palin may be a lot of things, but she ain’t no crack ho. This much is obvious and hardly needs spelling out. However, when a DNS redirect sent traffic from Crackho.com to Palin’s official Web site, she wasn’t too happy and a cease and desist letter was sent to the domain owner. But has a crime actually been committed?

Sarah Palin, for those who don’t know, was John McCain’s number two in his race for the White House against Barack Obama. That bid for power may have been unsuccessful, thank God, but Palin is still the Governor of Alaska and could run for the presidency in 2012. This is because, bizarrely, the Republican party seems to like her, even though the rest of us don’t.

According to Ars Technica, Shu Latif registered the domain Crackho.com way back in 1998, and then promptly did absolutely nothing with it. At least until 2008 when Sarah Palin was named as the Republican Vice President nominee. At that point, Latif set up a redirect so that all traffic heading for Crackho.com would instead go to the official Governor of Alaska State Web site.

A simple prank with no harm done I’m sure you’ll agree. Unfortunately, that’s not how Palin or the Attorney General of Alaska Michael Barnhill saw it. When they eventually discovered what was happening, which took them until earlier this month, they sent a cease and desist letter (pdf link).

The letter implies that Latif illegally used the official seal of the State of Alaska without permission, and was violating the federal Copyright Act. Except that it’s hard to see how a simple redirect can do anything of the sort. The seal was on Palin’s own Web site rather than Crackho.com. No content from the official Alaskan State Web site was used, permitted or otherwise.

Clearly scared by such a from-the-top legal threat, Latif has now conceded to the demand and removed the redirect. The site currently shows the picture above and has links to Sarah Palin’s Web site amongst others. In time though, Latif promises to shut the site down completely. Although, with the attention it’s now getting, I suspect its value has risen sharply in the last few days.

The decision to demand the redirect was taken down is a bizarre one. For starters there has been no crime committed and so the legal standpoint has no grounding in reality. But more than that is the fact that very few people would have been aware Palin was being labeled a crack ho if this had been left untouched. Now we all know, and probably all find it at least a little funny.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 1:42 am under Amusing, Internet, Legal, Opinion.

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