[h3][font style="font-family: Verdana; font-weight: normal;" size="2"]Too funny..........[/font]
[/h3][hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"][h3]Torrid tale of NBC, FCC, and Conan's manatee fetish site [/h3]Last week's edition of the [em]New York Times[/em] included [a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/arts/television/12mana.html?ex=1323579600&en=876fa915803cb2da&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss" target="_blank"]an odd item[/a] about NBC [a href="http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien/index.shtml"]latenight host Conan O'Brien[/a] doing an on-air bit about a hypothetical fetish site called [a href="http://hornymanatee.com/" target="_blank"]hornymanatee.com[/a]. But, the NYT reported: [blockquote]There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it. In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast. [br clear="all"] [/blockquote] Conan being Conan, he and the late-night team soon built out and launched a bogus porn site at that address, all about horny manatees. [em]Radar Magazine[/em] [a href="http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2006/12/conans-manatee-fetish-site-not-fccs-fault.php"]ran a followup item[/a], pointing out that... [/p][blockquote]There are no FCC regulations that required NBC to buy the domain. "We have no regulations dealing with URLs," says David Fiske, an FCC spokesman. "I don't know what they're talking about, frankly.""Yeah, the [em]Times[/em] overstated that a bit!" wrote Marc Liepis, a spokesman for the show, in an e-mail, explaining that NBC has a policy of registering domain names mentioned on-air not to comply with regulations but "to prevent others from registering sites that our talent mention, then trading off our intellectual property."[/p][/blockquote] Who cares. What readers no doubt want to know is -- finally, finally there is an online home for hot manatee-on-manatee action: [a href="http://hornymanatee.com/"]Link[/a].
