This is striking me as really funny, what a strange domain name for an IP theft site. I mean, I get it, but is it just me that sees some pretty amusing irony here?

Anyway, what’s even weirder is that it is essentially just information culled directly from the USPTO. Other than the homepage it looks like you can find all this info over at uspto.gov. It gets even more confusing as well because there’s this Stop Fakes Small Business site where the logo on the left is from and then there’s the real stopfakes.gov which is a really ugly and disorganized version. This post is about the nicer of the two.

I’m loving two facts about this, though. First off the focus here is small business. Now, I don’t know your definition of small business, but mine is the type of business that doesn’t have to fear piracy or counterfeit. I mean, I’m thinking a shop down on the corner. Or a design firm with less than 10 employees even. Secondly, the homepage says: “industry estimates of the cost of such theft range from $250 billion to 750,000 jobs per year.” OK, first, those seem like crazy-talk numbers. Secondly, again, small business? Small businesses are losing 750,000 jobs? Would that mean we’d be at a negative number of small businesses still in existence?

Lastly, this is definitely one of those faux standards sites. Nice, clean design that looks like you’d see all css and no tables, only view the source and there she is. Take note of the Macromedia Dreamweaver tags, too | function MM_swapImgRestore

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 8:05 am and is filed under Design, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.