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More "Buffy" Fansites Slayed
But this time, Fox has received some unlikely help in protecting its prized copyrights--and a bitter war has now broken out among Buffy Webmasters, who claim their competitors have ratted them out, and worse, sent out fake cease-and-desist letters to scare them off.
"There's a person or persons out there who are sending out bogus emails to Buffy Websites, purportedly on our behalf," confirms Fox spokesman Steven Melnick. "We're investigating to see who it might be, because they're not coming from us."
Fox is not saying how many of the counterfeit letters were sent out, or whether the studio has pinpointed any suspects.
For its part, the studio says it has sent out just two cease-and-desist letters in the past month, part of Fox's ongoing efforts to crack down on unofficial sites that infringe on the copyrights of its teen cult hit. The most recent site targeted by Fox was at www.mustreadtv.com/buffyscripts, which featured full Buffy scripts, often posted within 24 hours after the episodes aired.
"We always try to support the fans and their fansites, but we just need to make sure what they do is in line with copyrights and trademarks," Melnick says. "Usually, the fan sites are self-policing."
Some, however, claim the self-policing has gotten a bit out of hand. The purportedly fake legal threats were soon followed by a round of finger-pointing among the Buffy fan community, some of whom believed they had sniffed out a "traitor" and urged fans to boycott a site that may have been involved in the cease-and-desist scam.
Um, people, can't we all just get along?
"It sucks for all parties involved," says Jennifer Godwin, who runs BuffyNewsWire.com and has closely followed the latest round of sparring. One site, she claims, "is using Fox to eliminate its competition. It's a matter of using the rules to clear the playing field."
Buffy is hardly the first show to face copyright crackdowns on the Web. Fox has been similarly vigilant with unofficial Websites for The Simpsons, The X-Files and Star Wars, among others. Likewise, Warner Bros. recently hunted down several unofficial sites for Harry Potter, claiming they might cause "consumer confusion" with Warners' official site for the big-screen Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, due out in November.
Shannon Burnett, a Buffy fan who was ordered by Fox to remove multimedia clips from her site, theSlayer.net, says she understands that Fox must protect its property. But she thinks the crackdown sometimes goes too far.
"To a point, I think [self-policing] is a good thing if I have something up on my site that's going to harm someone," she says. "But as far as policing someone just because you don't want the competition so you can sell banner space, I have a problem with that."
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