Falha de S. Paulo

» see falhadespaulo.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Lino Bocchini is a journalist and his brother Mario is a designer. In September 2010, in the middle of a presidential election, the two of them put up a site that copied Folha de S.Paulo's masthead down to the typeface and changed a single letter. Folha became Falha, which in Portuguese means failure, and the web address matched the joke.

What ran on it was invented headlines and criticism, aimed at what the brothers read as the paper leaning toward José Serra and against Dilma Rousseff in its election coverage. The form is old and travels well. It is the fake front page handed out at a protest, and it only works if the counterfeit sits close enough to the original to sting.

The Frias family, who own Folha, were in court inside three weeks. Their claim was trademark, arguing the two names and addresses sat close enough to confuse readers about who was publishing what. A judge granted a preliminary injunction carrying a fine of a thousand reais for every day the site stayed up, and on 4 October 2010 Registro.br froze the domain under that order.

~ the record ~

~ seventeen days ~

Seventeen days is the whole published life of the site. Nothing about its traffic or its jokes is why anyone outside Brazil has heard of it. What made it a case was the speed at which a newspaper could get a national registry to switch off a critic's domain, and the fact that the critic was mocking that newspaper's election coverage while the election was still running.

Folha's own ombudsman wrote that the paper had damaged itself by taking the blog down. That is the kind of sentence an ombudsman column exists to produce, and it changed nothing about the litigation.

~ the case ~

At a hearing in May 2011 Folha's lawyer put terms on the table: the site could come back if it dropped the logo and the typefaces. That is an offer to permit a parody on condition it stop resembling the thing being parodied. The brothers turned it down.

The São Paulo state court upheld the original decision in 2013. Free expression groups outside the country picked the case up as an illustration of Brazil's takedown habit, where an injunction removes the material first and the argument runs for years afterward. It reached the Superior Court of Justice in 2015, and on 21 June 2017 the STJ reversed everything beneath it, ruling that parody is protected and that Falha had breached neither trademark nor competition law.

~ the legacy ~

The brothers did not restore the site after they won. They kept a separate one, Desculpe a Nossa Falha, which documents the case instead of continuing the parody, and falhadespaulo.com.br does not resolve today.

The ruling is the artifact that survived. Brazilian lawyers cite it, while the blog itself exists as screenshots and as a photograph of two brothers sitting through a hearing at the state tribunal. The parody outlasted its own deletion by turning into case law, which was nobody's plan.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »