The Devil's Own Blog From God's Own County

A couple of weeks ago I registered that famous Daily Mail headline as a domain name and set it to forward to the Mail site. It seems that the Daily Mail doesn't understand domain forwarding and thinks I spend hours faithfully copying their right wing bile resulting in this letter. Just to keep the brainless cretins in their legal department happy I have popped this page in to explain what is happening - namely that the Daily Mail had a total sense of humour failure and employs some of the dimmest lawyers in the universe - they couldn't even pull my name out of the domain registration enquiry and sent the letter by courier to "At Baht" - DHL looked at my passport and shrugged.

Anyway here is the newspaper that proudly supported the British League of Fascists and Nazi Germany - The Daily Hate

Of course had the Daily Mail any brain it wouldn't arse around making false allegations like those below but would add this to the .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} hurrahfortheblackshirts\.co\.uk[NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Or it would buy the domain and use it to apologise for its past support of fascists and continuing support of some very dubious right wing thoughts.

Given that I think the Mail has made a complete arse of itself with this letter I ought to say what I would have done so:

Dear sir etc

We note you are forwarding the above domain to our home page and understand this has been done lightheartedly with humorous intent. We feel it would be more informative if your domain was directed to this page ... on our site which explains the headline in the context of the time and that with hindsight it was unwise. This was amply demonstrated by the Daily Mail's subsequent support of the war against Nazi Germany. We would like to give you the opportunity to make this change but inform you that from .... our servers will be reconfigured to ensure our desired page is displayed.

Over to the Mail .... this page could have been much more positive had you not fired off an aggressive letter that is factually incorrect (none of the material was being reproduced by me - it was all being produced by your own servers in response to client requests, as pointed out by a comment below your letter in fact requests me to remove material from your own servers) and a humourless response to a harmless joke that makes you look as bad as Private Eye portrays Paul Dacre.

Now turning to the matter of intellectual property - the only thing I have is the domain based on the phrase "Hurrah for the Blackshirts". Provided the Mail provides a statement in writing confirming that this phrase is of value to it because it believes the majority of its readership would be proud of that headline rather than ashamed of it (i.e. it has and seeks a fascist readership) then I will happily surrender the domain to them.