The parasite
According to this self-proclaimed First Amendment champion, most of corporate America "sucks."
"I just got letters from Victoria's Secret and Penn State," says Dan Parisi in his rapid-fire New Jersey tongue. "I own Victoriassecretsucks.com and Pennstatesucks.com and they want me to transfer it over to them. All these letters are the same. They are from some lawyer and they say I've got their client's property and I should transfer it to them, and then they include a transfer form. I got one from Merrill Lynch for Merrilllynchsucks.com, but then I never heard from them again."
Indeed, Parisi estimates he has received at least 50 "sucks"-related lawyer letters so far, but at press time just one of them had gone past the warning stage. "They all know that if this goes to court they will lose," he says. However, it is aviation giant Lockheed's gripe with, what else, Lockheedsucks.com that Parisi believes will be the key case in establishing him as a First Amendment champion or trademark villain.
Meet Dan Parisi, the 40-year-old former asbestos-removal contractor-turned-corporate complainer and, um, profitable purveyor of online porn. In his corporate gadfly role Parisi is the holder of 500-odd "sucks" domain names, from Microsoftsucks.com ("my most popular one," he says) to Boeingsucks.com. Some of the other companies to which Parisi has appended "sucks" and then registered the domain name include American Express and Delta Airlines, and for good measure there's the omnibus Corporate America Sucks address. All of them link directly to Sucks.com, a veritable "sucks" portal where Parisi hopes wronged consumers will complain, complain, complain. But why? "I've always been interested in free speech," says Parisi, who funds Sucks.com with the proceeds from his online porn site Whitehouse.com, which he says made about $2 million in profit last year.
Corporate America gets prickly when its brands are joined to the word sucks. But Parisi usually wins. Lockheed took its case to the World Intellectual Property Organisation to get Parisi to give up Lockheedsucks.com. In January a WIPO panel sided with Parisi, 2 to 1. "The dissent was the Boeing guy we tried to get off the panel," Parisi says. "What a surprise he would vote against us."
â€"John Galvin
FRIENDS - Regarding Corporate America, think you will enjoy the first 3 chapters of my upcoming book, I LEAP OVER THEIR HEADS!, regarding General Electric (GE) and their reprehensible behavior. You can read them by going to www.edwardbaskett.com.