Just because you have a blog does not mean you can slander away and engage in copyright violation.

Jake, satire and parody are forms of speech that are protected under the First Amendment. Just ask Bill "I'll sue anyone who dares to make fun of me and call it slander" O'Reilly. O'Reilly and his Fox attorneys were tossed out of court and scolded by the judge in his case against Al Franken. This is no different. I just don't have a major publisher behind me to ensure that I can enjoy the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

In America you get what you pay for. A colleague of mine once said, "I tell my clients that I'm just like a jukebox, if ya wanna dance and hear me sing, ya gotta give me some coin."

Frankly, Fritz, I'd put the images back. You are on solid legal ground if your piece is satire, and most lawyers no better than to bother suing an empty pocket, especially one who may just be able to make their client look like fools.

I've gotten cease and desist notices before. I usually just pull the items off my site because they have gotten stale and I don't want to be bothered.

The difference with this is that the Discovery Channel lawyers appear to be deliberately deceptive. My post about the neo-Nazi symbols promoted by the host of Monster Garage was on Feb. 8th. Today, they sent me an e-mail stating that they sent a previous message on Feb. 3rd -- five days before that post appeared.

I think they are trying to obscure the fact that the Feb. 8th post made them aware of my blog in the first place. They are probably trying to mask their true intentions -- shutting down my blog to eliminate the content that makes them look bad for promoting a neo-Nazi hate symbol.

I think I have eliminated any cause they could have to bully my Web host from pulling the plug on me. And, I've drawn attention to what I believe is the real reason I drew their ire.

Hi there Fritz. Don't let them bully you, but at the same time I think it's wise to choose your battles.

Copyright lawyers will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes :-|

On the other hand, there's no reason to not make the images available on a different site and ask everybody to mirror it. The big guns, as you've figured out, is the DMCA and requiring ISPs to pull the plug before there's any trial or judgment. If it's on a different site, they can get that pulled, but it'll just pop up again, and again, and again, causing more bad publicity with each iteration.

I agree with TM Lutas, we could all reproduce the images to explain to our readers what the whole thing is about in detail, otherwise how can they judge if Fritz is right or not, no? We could also host them in a serves in Pakistan and link to them. (Or Venezuela for that matter, then wh will they shut down?

First lawsuit, rather than threat of lawsuit, and I put together the legal defense fund. No sense in starting before then.

I don't buy it tho. The Iron Cross is a staple of motorcycle iconography, I believe because both the cross and motorcycles are known as Iron.

I know a lot of skin heads use the Iron Cross, but the Cross in itself is not a Nazi symbol, say like the Death's Head or the SS or worst of all, the Swastika; the Iron Cross was a German award going back to Bismark.