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Buffy's sites must die

Suffer not a 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' site to die - especially after the series strong showing on the Internet is strongly credited with boosting the TV program's ratings in the first place.

So why is 20th Century Fox now launching a jihad against the sites of the undead? Well, gentle, user listen up to our sad tale of woe ...

Since 1997, Buffy fan John Lee has spent the majority of his leisure time lovingly honing his Buffy site into a QuickTime shrine to the Fox television star and her vampire-slaying high school chums.

That was before the University of California student got a nasty little legal letter from lawyer types working for 20th Century Fox, the corporate owner's of Buffy.

Our legal pals said that even though John had put up various legal disclaimers, because John's site was coded from various images, movies and sound clips, his nerdy student body was going to have to press the delete button on his hobby or face the wrath of a Fortune 1000 law suit.

Quoting from the lawyers letter: "Fox has dedicated tremendous time and resources to the creation of quality entertainment programming such as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

However, such corporate bully-boy tactics are not winning Fox any fans in the Web community.

One of the threatened fans, Andre Cohen, has this to say. "This is an absolute disgrace. If the fan's activities were such a terrible threat to corporate America, how come we didn't get these legal letters when Buffy was in season one? It's because they needed us then. It's every marketer's wet dream, getting a big fan following. Viral marketing on-line means a massive boost to ratings. Of course the fuckers didn't come after us then. The TV series would have died on its feet."

Some Buffy lovers, not content with having organized a legitimate national blackout day on 13 May, when every fan site will be replaced with a darkened-wreath to protest the Fox crack-down.

However, Fox's police action have attracted the attention of an elite group of hackers called Silicon Armageddon, who are best known for releasing sensitive CIA material on spy-sat targets to newgroups in protest at the US intervention in Bosnia.

Silicon Armageddon - obviously vampire slayer fans - have been making noise in the alt.buffy newsgroup about the pain they are going to put Fox through.

"Let's see how Fox like it when every major theater release to make it out of their studio ends up on the Web as a download, a day after its release," the hackers threatened. "They haven't been righteous in how they've treated the fans. But they will learn. We shall teach them."

Isn't that's the trouble with graves. Just as soon as you've dug one for someone else, you realize that you're going to need one for yourself soon enough.

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