Comment by frereubu

While studying fine art I built a site that was intended to experiment with disrupting advertising by picking on a bullshit pseudo-scientific term, "bifidus digestivum", used by the company Danone as the live ingredient in their yoghurts, and ranking highly for that term on Google - it eventually got to the number 1 spot. Danone's legal team got in touch and we danced around each other for a bit. It was clear that the original domain used their trademark and that would be enforceable in court, so I gave that to them a couple of weeks after setting up a new domain that wasn't just their trademark and redirecting all the traffic until Google caught up with the move: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ (They'd changed the magic ingredient's name by that point, partially because of the ridicule the initial name provoked). I replied to their emails addressing their points - no, I was not making any money from it so there's no commercial harm, I was just laying out the facts so there was no defamation etc. and after two or three bits of back-and-forth they went away. The site's had something like 500,000 visits since I built it in the late 2000s, which isn't a lot in the large scheme of things, but I hope it helped people who wondered whether it was bullshit know that it was bullshit.

I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced sense of righteousness.