• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 11, 2011

The private conglomerate Koch Industries isn't entitled to learn the identities of Web users who created a fake site parodying the company's position on environmental regulations, a judge has ruled.

U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball in Utah ruled this week that the Wichita, Kansas-based Koch had no valid grounds to sue the parodists for cybersquatting, trademark infringement or other related charges based on a spoof site. Therefore, Kimball ruled, Koch was not entitled to unmask the site's creators.

The dispute centers on a hoax by the group that called itself "Youth for Climate Change." Last December, members sent several news organizations a phony press release announcing that Koch had stopped funding groups that deny climate change. The parodists' press release included a link to a phony site, www.koch-inc.com, which mimicked the real Koch site. The spoof site was only live for a few hours.

Koch Industries, which operates oil refineries in three states, strongly opposes environmental regulations. The company, with estimated annual revenue of $100 billion, is run by two brothers described by The New Yorker as "longtime libertarians" who have "funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies -- from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program -- that in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus."

This week, Kimball rejected all of Koch's claims and ruled that the company could not sue for cybersquatting, trademark infringement or other, related counts because Youth for Climate Change had not used Koch's name to make a profit. "The press release addressed only Koch's views on political issues, it did not address Koch's commercial goods and services," Kimball wrote. "Koch lacks any evidence or plausible theory as to how defendants could have profited commercially from an anonymous spoof website that sold no products and solicited no donations, that was disclosed only to reporters, and that was only online for a matter of hours."

The parodists were represented by Public Citizen, which represents MediaPost in an unrelated matter.