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Compressed Data; Don't Mind That Lawsuit, It's Just a Joke

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January 29, 2001, Section C, Page 4Buy Reprints
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Seven million Internet users could be in a heap of trouble over their use of an Internet icon, the frowny face.

That is the contention of Despair .com, a company in Dallas that has officially registered the symbol :-( as its trademark. Despair says it has filed a lawsuit against the millions of people who infringe the company's intellectual property rights by typing the symbol in e-mail messages to denote sadness.

The lawsuit is a joke, but the trademark is real. The company, which sells parodies of inspirational posters (one reads: ''Quitters Never Win, Winners Never Quit, but Those Who Never Win and Never Quit are Idiots'') filed for the trademark with the United States Patent Office in 1998. Justin Sewell, the company's co-founder, said Despair was stunned to receive a letter in May 2000 that officially granted it registration No. 2347676.

Mr. Sewell, 29, said the company had put out the mock news release about the lawsuit earlier this month to satirize recent developments in intellectual property law, like the patent awarded to Amazon.com for its ''one-click'' ordering system. That patent has been criticized in the high-technology industry as part of a trend that extends property rights to inventions and ideas that critics say do not merit the protection and that squelch innovation.

Despair's news release, sideswiping another target for parody, stated that the company -- whose motto is ''Another Dissatisfied Customer'' -- used the F.B.I.'s ''Carnivore'' Internet wiretap system to surreptitiously monitor e-mail to compile a list of seven million people who had used the frowny symbol in their messages.

The joke ended up backfiring on Despair. After a brief article about the news release appeared on the popular online site Slashdot last Friday, Mr. Sewell said he was inundated with angry e-mail messages from readers who could not discern the parody. JOHN SCHWARTZ

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the National edition with the headline: Compressed Data; Don't Mind That Lawsuit, It's Just a Joke. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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