Autism Speaks 1
NT Speaks 0
14-year-old hears from AS lawyers.
By Dave Gerardi
Autism Speaks triumphs over Michigan teenager? Fourteen-year-old sued by huge charity? Don’t you love the Internet?
Blogs lit up in January when Fark.com, a popular community-driven site linking to interesting and/or humorous news stories on the Web, pointed viewers to a forum thread at AspiesForFreedom.com in which a user named ‘abscout’ reported he had to take down his site, NTSpeaks.org, after legal pressure from AustismSpeaks.org.
The timeline is this: Sometime in early 2007, Kelly Becker (aka ‘abscout’) put up a Web site called NTSpeaks.org to spoof AutismSpeaks.org. He used several images from the Autism Speaks Web site as part of his NTSpeaks design. Becker claims an individual from Autism Speaks hacked into his forum and deleted the database in late 2007.
On January 18, 2008, he posted a message on the Aspies for Freedom (AFF) about a lawsuit from Autism Speaks. According to his post, the legal document was signed by 30 lawyers and sued for $90,000 for copyright infringement (AS’s logos, phrases and all trademarked material) and funds lost.
On January 19, abscout posted on the AFF forum that he gave Autism Speaks the NTSpeaks.org domain name and AS retracted the lawsuit. The story began to make the rounds as bloggers posted their outrage that a huge charity would pick on a 14-year-old. Two days later, Gareth Nelson, founder of AFF, bought the domains NTSpeaks.com and NTSpeaks.net (which, let’s be honest, is a hilarious ‘screw you’ move).
The facts are these: Kelly Becker (not his real name) is 14 and autistic. There was no lawsuit. Lawyers for Autism Speaks contacted the owner of NTSpeaks.org (Becker designed it, but the site itself was purchased for him by Gary Moody, whose daughters attended dance class with Becker). Moody removed the site. NTSpeaks.org was never given to Autism Speaks. (Moody also says the hacking issue had more to do with his rebuilding his Web server than a serious security issue.)
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It was roughly seven years ago when the autism community came together in our nation’s capital to argue that there was something seriously wrong with the ingredients in vaccines. Parents of children with autism believed that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury was acting as an environmental trigger, and coupled with a predisposition, the exposure eventually caused autism in their children.
