Newspaper Innovation

Associated Newspapers, the publisher of Metro UK has taken legal action against the distributors of the fake Metro that was handed out in London Friday July 2.

The fake issue carried headlines like “Gordon Brown to be deported to Scotland” (front page, right, click for bigger version), “Two days of actions against Racist Press” and  ”Myth-Busting the Media”.

According to Indymedia UK “Metro has obtained a High Court injunction against “all persons responsible for the publication and/or distribution” of the fake issue, but as the distributors are unknown, “the injunction seems to have been served upon the wrong people”.

The fake Metro – called Metr0 (with a zero instead of the o) – is to be tied to a group that also set up a PressAction blog last month, the article on Indymedia is similar to that on PressAction.

Indymedia/PressAction:

“The owners of Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, claim this is an infringement of the company’s trademark copyrights, while campaigners argue the company directors “do not have a sense of humour” and have “gone too far in suppressing free speech to protect their commercial interests.”

A spokesperson for Press Action said: “It is very likely that whoever did the spoof was inspired by our callout and wanted to use our name and register the domain with a common address, such as LARC’s, to protect their anonymity. To argue that LARC is “clearly involved with the two days of action,” as the Metro solicitors did in court, is just a desperate search for a scapegoat that is guilty by association.”

The injunction order and other material can be downloaded from Indymedia, on Flickr (source of the picture on the right) more pictures can be viewed.

Distributing fake free papers is not new, a fake activist version of  free daily 20 Minuten in Switzerland appeared when the World Economic Forum gathered in Switzerland, while the French labour union published a fake Direct Matin issue during a strike. The New York Times and de Volkskrant (Netherlands) were also published earlier as free activist papers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.