Is there any kind of inexpensive association that's been put together to provide, for bloggers, a legal insurance for its members to defend against these kinds of attacks.

I will be happy to help organize such an Association, and try to put together a volunteer legal team of litigators to assist. Our newly-organized Benjamin Franklin Legal Foundation will support the effort. For more information see www.benlegal.com. My contact information is there. Let's see if the power of the blogosphere can overcome heavy-handed tactics like those the Times directed at the National Debate.

How can a Parody not be a parody? When it is true.

Oh thou sarcasm queen, thy sting requires expensive lawsuits for 'hurting my feelings'.

No, and there shouldn't be. Just more money in lawyer's pockets.

I've always believed that in these cases, the onus is on the "aggrieved" party to prove to a judge that the satire was in violation of copyright laws. That way the judge can throw it out before the target even needs to respond, hire a lawyer, etc. Otherwise, it's just too easy for orgs like the NYT to scare the crap out of people like this.

As for use of the NYT logo, that's a different story, but the point is still that if you to the NYT website, you couldn't click to the parady and be confused as to whether it was a legitimate page. You can only access through the National Debate site!

Having said that, I am not a lawyer...thank God.

James: You overestimate the perceptive abilities of the average web surfer. By a lot.

If the original paroder (it's a word now) had had three brain cells to rub together and had made it clearly look unlike the NYT web site, the NYT wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. As is, it's using images directly from the NYT site - co-opting trademarked images - and going to great lengths to look exactly like an NYT site. I love me a good parody, but in this case the guy deserves to be hit with a big honking lawsuit.

But it's still a question of which rights should predominate: the object of the parody's copyright and trademarks, or the parodist's right to appropriate said trademarks to commit satire? Harvard Lampoon published parodies of Playboy and Life. Mad magazine appropriated the music to a song and put their own lyrics to it. Granted, taking the entire page brings it closer to a judgmental question. Rewriting the headlines on the borders, for example, and substituting the ads would have strengthened his case, but that in the end wouldn't have kept the New York Times away.

Hamilton, the issue isn't whether the Times has a copyright, it's whether the parody was a "fair use" of the copyright. Fair use questions are always arguable, but this one seems to me at least to be not all that close: a parody that is identifiable as a parody is generally a fair use.

I think the main point is that by doing this the NYT looks like a bunch of buffoons.

Hamilton, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm asking this truly for enlightenment: How could Cox's NYT Corrections page be a parody if it didn't look like a real NYT Corrections page? Isn't that the definition of a parody - a work that simultaneously conveys the message that it is and is not the thing being parodied?

It seems to me that, since the policy of the NYT is not to print corrections of its op-ed pieces, the page of corrections of Times op-ed pieces could be nothing but a parody. Or haven't I thought this through properly?