Down for 48 Hours.
By Craig W. Walsh
On July 22, 2004, the Daily Telegraph’s City Diary ran a short piece about this website. It was mostly complimentary — the columnist noted that I had “made quite a professional job of it” — and it included a call to Coutts for comment. A spokesperson initially found the site “quite funny.”
She called back shortly afterwards with a rather different message.
| “We think this is defamatory to Coutts and we’re consulting our lawyers to see what our next step will be.”
— Coutts spokesperson, Daily Telegraph, July 22, 2004 |
Their next step turned out to be a letter from a posh London law firm, addressed not to me but to my hosting company. The letter demanded that the site be taken down immediately.
The hosting company — not Parcom, who came later — complied without hesitation. CouttsSucks.com went dark.
The Man in Hong Kong
At that time, all of our websites were managed by a young man based in Hong Kong who handled our internet presence with quiet efficiency. When the site went down, he didn’t panic. He had, as a matter of routine, maintained a complete backup of everything.
The site was gone. The content was not.
The question was where to put it. I needed a hosting company that would not cave the moment a law firm sent a strongly worded letter. In the internet world of 2004, such companies existed — but you had to know where to look.
Crazy Dave
I found Dave Parmele.
Dave ran Parcom, a web hosting company based in Bellevue, Washington. He had been in the business since 1997, and he had built a reputation for quality, reliability, and a very specific philosophy about when he would and would not take a website down.
His position was simple: he would remove a site when — and only when — he received a court order instructing him to do so. Not a letter from a law firm. Not a threatening phone call. Not a strongly worded email on expensive letterhead. A court order.
Until that court order arrived, the site stayed up.
I called Dave. I explained the situation. He was entirely unfazed. CouttsSucks.com was back online within twelve hours of going dark.
| Dave’s data centre was housed in the most secure building in Seattle. Everything about Parcom said ‘quality.’ Where else are you going to get service like that?
— A Parcom customer, 2008 |
The Daily Telegraph followed up with a short piece explaining what had happened — that the site had been taken down by a legal threat and restored within 48 hours by a hosting company that understood the difference between a court order and a lawyer’s letter.
Coutts did not pursue the matter further. No court order ever came. The site remained up.
The Climbdown
Exactly one month after the Daily Telegraph City Diary piece — on August 22, 2004 — the Sunday Telegraph ran a full feature on consumer protest websites. It was headlined “Revenge of the Cyberspoofers.” I was photographed with my Highland cattle at Lucies Farm, and the piece ran at considerable length.
The Coutts spokesperson this time had a rather different message from the one delivered in July.
| “The information is not defamatory.”
— Coutts spokesperson, Sunday Telegraph, August 22, 2004 |
From “we’re consulting our lawyers” to “the information is not defamatory” in thirty days. One can only speculate about what those lawyers told them.
The subheading of the Sunday Telegraph piece said it well: “Firms in the firing line are beginning to realise that the law is not usually on their side.”
A Word About Dave
Dave Parmele ran Parcom for nearly two decades. By all accounts, he was exactly the kind of host he appeared to be — principled, reliable, and personally invested in the people whose websites he looked after. One loyal customer described visiting his data centre in Seattle and being struck by the quality of everything Dave had built.
Around 2014, Dave sold Parcom. The reviews from customers after the sale suggest the new owners were rather less interested in the qualities that had made Parcom exceptional. The service deteriorated rapidly. Several long-standing customers reported losing data.
What happened to Dave himself is not known. One hopes he retired comfortably. He deserved to.
CouttsSucks.com was down for twelve hours in the summer of 2004. It came back because one man in Washington State had decided that a lawyer’s letter was not a good enough reason to silence someone.
That is worth remembering.
A Note on the Press Coverage
Both the Daily Telegraph City Diary piece (July 22, 2004) and the Sunday Telegraph feature (August 22, 2004) are reproduced below. Read them together and you will see, in the space of thirty days, a large private bank discover that the law of defamation does not, in fact, protect institutions from criticism by their former customers.
The internet was young in 2004. The legal framework around consumer protest websites was still being established. Coutts — like many large corporations at the time — assumed that a strongly worded letter from a London law firm would be sufficient to make an inconvenient website disappear.
It wasn’t. It isn’t. And twenty-two years later, the website is still here.
Revenge of the Cyberspoofers
Don’t get mad, get even. That’s what angry customers are doing by setting up websites attacking companies and their policies.
Robert Watts reports
Sunday Telegraph, August 22, 2004.
“The information is not defamatory,” says Coutts
It’s not often the City gets excited about a cattle farmer from Worcestershire. But Craig Walsh’s creation of a website lampooning the Queen’s bank has turned him into something of a folk hero in the Square Mile.
In between managing his indignant Highland cattle, Walsh has created couttssucks.com, which recounts his side of a sorry tale in which Coutts, owned by Royal Bank of Scotland, over-charged him by nearly £18,000 and then closed his 18-year-old account with just one month’s notice.
“I was mad at them, but I knew if I wrote to them I would get a very courteous, corporate reply — this has been, well, cathartic,” says Walsh, whose only other experience of internet design was creating a website for the Guernsey Cattle Association.
“Building the site was pretty simple, and it’s just £9 for a domain name and £10 for a year’s hosting. My only regret is that I couldn’t see the look on the face of Coutts’ bankers when they saw the site — those people are so patrician.”
While underworked City types have been happily forwarding the site’s address to colleagues and chums, the august bank, formally famous for its frock-coated clerks, hasn’t quite seen the joke.
Coutts doesn’t regard the content of the site as libellous, but — even so — it fired off a letter to the internet service provider that hosts Walsh’s site; and soon after the site was closed.
However, the farmer isn’t one to give up, and 48 hours later the site was up and running again courtesy of another ISP.
When we spoke to Coutts the bank seemed to have given up. “We acknowledge the information on this site is not currently defamatory,” a Coutts spokesman said. “On this basis, we do not feel that the site is a major risk to our reputation. We will not take the matter further.”
Countless corporate victims of “cybersmearers,” or those who create websites that spoof corporate ones, usually as a manifestation of consumer complaints, are finding that the firms on the firing line are trying to fight back. They use lawyers and even private investigators to help close down the e-pranksters. But they are starting to realise that the law is not usually on their side.
Just about any large firm you care to mention has been hit. British Telecom had to suffer the indignity of btsuck.org, which features a vicious attack on BT’s internet services.
NTHellworld.co.uk is devoted to incinerating the telecoms company’s reputation, while Satansbusycoffee.co.uk invites visitors to edit the logo of the coffee shop chain with a green marker pen to produce a rather crude imperative.
Then there’s mitsubishisucks.com, microsuck.com, and chasebanksucks.com.
“Our raison d’être is to poke fun and stir things up a bit,” says the creator of www.Satansbusу.co.uk, a spoof of the beleaguered supermarket chain’s website. The site is a convincing imitation of Sainsbury’s official one, although the picture of the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is captioned “irritatingly smug and crass advert.”
Another bon mot is “Strawberries. We put them in a punnet, with the nice ones on top and the rotten ones below.” And then there is this: “Organics. Want less do you? OK we’ll charge you more for it. Come on you mugs, you can afford it!”
The site’s manager, who will only say that his name is “Stan”, claims he’s even sold some of his pricey “Satansbusу. Making your life hell” T-shirts to people at Sainsbury’s head office for £14.99 a pop.
One member of the supermarket’s staff did not see the funny side and used his work e-mail account to send “Stan” a note promising to “rip out your f***ing teeth when I find your address through your ISP number”.
The company’s official spokesman said: “We do employ people to monitor such sites. With this one we felt taking down the site would only do more harm than good.” But would Sainsbury have been able to close the site, even if it had wanted to? The law that should protect corporates from such abuse is so-called “passing off”, where an entity imitates another in a bid to feed off its good name and reputation. However, for someone to be convicted of passing off there must be some evidence that the consumer has been ‘confused’ into thinking the spoof site is the genuine article.
“Because the English all have a sophisticated and slightly cynical sense of humour, they are not confused by these sites. When you see a parody website, you know full well that it is one,” says Chris Forsyth, an intellectual property partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the leading law firm.
Companies may be able to take action on the basis of the law covering trademark or copyright infringement, and also possibly for defamation.
“The trouble is these sites are carefully constructed not to cross the line,” says Sarah Hudson, an associate in the intellectual property department at Eversheds. However, she believes starbuckscoffee.co.uk wouldn’t last five minutes if the coffee giant took action.
But even if the firm does produce a strong enough case, who does it post the writ to? Few of the websites name their creators. So targeted companies are hiring private detectives to find the cybersmearers.
Spencer Burgess, a director at Carratu International, a leading corporate investigator, says: “We get asked to monitor the net and also to track down the people who put these sites together.
“Some of this does involve sophisticated IT, but it also involves undercover work. The trouble is the people we’re looking for know this and are becoming increasingly sophisticated.”
Consequently, law firms are increasingly advising their clients to target the internet service provider that hosts the website.
Reputable American and European ISPs will normally withdraw the website after a strongly worded letter, but this is not always the case with ISPs in the Far East or less developed countries. Anyway, the website creators can always follow Walsh’s tactic and move their site to another ISP.
NTL, the telecoms group, adopted a more imaginative way of fighting back. When the company’s attention was drawn to NTHellworld.com, a forum for its fuming customers, it simply bought the site from its owners.
However, it may have been cash down the drain. Worried that their views would be sanitised, the founders simply resurrected their site at nthellworld.co.uk.
Perhaps prevention is a more sensible step. For instance, Marks and Spencer owns the domain names for marksandspencersucks.com and eBay holds the rights to ebaysucks.com.
Meanwhile, Royal Bank of Scotland has bought the derogatory web-address versions of its brand and of the moniker for its NatWest arm. But its Coutts subsidiary was slow off the mark. A cattle farmer from Worcester got there first.