The Ann Arbor Public Schools official website has been spoofed with this nearly identical looking, but satirical, political site. According to M-Live and the Ann Arbor News today, the school district has responded to with a cease-and-desist letter to the domain service provider who manages the anonymous registration (GoDaddy.com). The story begins by noting that the school district has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the domain host:

District officials said Monday that a cease-and-desist letter is being sent to the domain host for the fake site, which looks like the district's own Web site, down to the picture of a district school behind the header and the correct contact numbers for district personnel. It even has an official-sounding Web address: annarborpublicschools.org.

District spokeswoman Liz Margolis said the cease-and-desist letter claims infringement on the district's intellectual property. District officials say people could be confused into thinking the site is the district's actual Web site.

Here's an example of the clear satire provided by the site:

"We don't currently have a plan to fix our financial problems, but we're scrambling to have an outside auditor to do our work for us in finding out what has gone so horribly wrong lately.''

A similar spoof has been running for some time, found at www.proposedhighschool.org, run by Citizens for Responsible Schools which is opposed to the building of a new high school.

District officials said the criticism on the site is pretty similar to common criticisms they hear. Margolis said that's not what the district is concerned with.

The Ann Arbor News story suggests that District officials are worried that the site would be mistaken for the district's real site, but the spokesperson for the schools makes a tremendous mistake in saying the school wouldn't pursue the matter much further than the cease-and-desist letter, thereby weakening the very purpose of such a threat:

Instead, officials are concerned that residents won't know it's a spoof site.

"People could look at it and think it's a real site for the district,'' Margolis said.

However, the district doesn't plan to pursue the matter much further than the cease-and-desist letter.

"We're not going to spend a lot of district dollars fighting it,'' Margolis said.

While that was an unwise demonstration of no resolve, the Ann Arbor News reporter interviews a Michigan Press Association attorney who thinks there might be a "legitimate case" here:

The district might have a legitimate case to make, said Dawn Hertz, an attorney for the Michigan Press Association.

"This is a very interesting intersection between free speech and intellectual property rights,'' she said after reviewing the two sites. "There's a chance that people might be misled. If they (the Web site owners) were to change the format so they didn't look exactly like the official site, it would be different.''

There might. The image of the top bar and the one shown in this blog entry of the text used copyrightable elements, but the entire point of a spoof is to "look like" what you're spoofing. I believe most rational readers will quickly discern that this is a spoof site, and given the strong First Amendment, doctrines of fair use and satire, and core political speech considerations, agree with the wisdom that the school district shouldn't try to make this a test case (there are better test cases out there for spoof sites with less political motives). "Fair use" weighs both the amount of copying and the nature of the use - given that the nature is purely political and no profit is made and the school itself is a non-profit governmental entity, the school will have an uphill fight. But it is an interesting case.