St. Scholastica is For Losers

St. Scholastica is a private university in Duluth, Minn. Their tuition is $18,106 per year. And that's not counting the $110 health services fee (required at St. Scholastica, but free at public universities) and the room and board in the dorms ($2,600 is the cheapest price). So why am I mentioning this college? Because they are threatening to sue me.

Apparently, ripping off their own students with overpriced tuition and other ridiculous fees isn't enough. They feel the need to rob people who don't attend their school as well.

Here's the story behind the potential lawsuit. Five years ago, during my freshman year of college at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, I started this website as a place to post my Ramblings columns. At the time, a kid I knew from high school was attending St. Scholastica. One day, he sent me a link to a website he had made to spoof my college. It was a classic comedy bit: the expensive college making fun of the inexpensive college. Of course, I responded with my own spoof of St. Scholastica.

That was five years ago. At the time, I didn't expect this website to last very long, so I stuffed the St. Scholastica spoof in a seldom-visited humor archives section and forgot about it.

In May of this year, I transferred my entire website to an official server with a domain name: www.dailyramblings.com.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that when you have an official domain name, the search engines list all the pages on your website. And they rank your pages rather high on its search engine results.

So sometime last month, Larry Goodwin, St. Scholastica's chancellor, must have searched for his own name on Google.com (how modest of him). Funny as it is, if you type "Larry Goodwin" into Google.com, the fifth site you get is St. Scholastica's official site. The second site you get is the old spoof page on this site. Let me just say this to Larry: Ha!

Granted, I have erased the spoof pages, at the request of St. Scholastica's overpaid lawyers, "Hanft Fride". But Google.com's description of my spoof page still records my opinion of their college: "Filled with Stuck-up Morons and Pricks." Go to Google.com and search for "Larry Goodwin". You'll see.

Either way, I implore St. Scholastica and "Hanft Fride" (a stupid name for a law firm, by the way) to sue me. I'd love to see them try. The claims they made were for "libelous publication", "invasion of privacy" and "use of copyrighted material".

Here's a description in the constitution of the use of copyrighted material:

Although fair use originated "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, ... scholarship, or research," it also applies in other areas . . .

Criticism is fair use for copyrighted material. Eat my sack, St. Scholastica. My spoof was criticizing your overpriced tuition, as well as your ridiculous students.

Take that, Hanft Fride! Copyrighted images! But I'm using them to show criticism! You're powerless!

And as for the libelous publication and invasion of privacy, libel involves proving, without a doubt, that your life was harmed or altered in a negative way by the so-called libelous item. Since this website receives absolutely no visitors, I'd love to see who they'd find to testify in a court of law. The proof needed to prove "invasion of privacy" is almost identical to the libel law, so they're screwed.

So I say this:

KISS MY SWEET ASS, ST. SCHOLASTICA!

I rest my case.