About the Museum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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Ann Arbor Public School Site
Status: Parody
The website of the Ann Arbor Public School system can be found at http://www.aaps.k12.mi.us/. A parody version of it (created by an unknown author) is at http://annarborpublicschools.org/. Apparently the school district doesn't find the parody amusing, because they're sending its domain host a cease-and-desist letter claiming infringement of their intellectual property. The two sites do look very similar, but I don't think their case would hold up in court. After all, parody relies upon copying elements of whatever it's making fun of, and parody has always been a "fair use" exception to copyright that the courts have strongly defended. However, the question will be whether the case ever gets to a court. Often domain hosts see a cease-and-desist letter and immediately take down the material in question rather than risk any kind of legal action. We'll have to wait and see what happens here. But I took a screen shot of the parody site, just in case it does disappear.