The Trump Organization Went After a 17-Year-Old’s Cat Parody Website

The Trump Organization Went After a 17-Year-Old’s Cat Parody Website

You’ve got to be kitten me.

In February of this year, 17-year-old Lucy (last name withheld from current reporting) created the website “trumpscratch.com,” which allowed users to paw at cut-out photos of the Commander-in-Chief.

(Definitely don’t visit that URL at work, by the way. It’s now something very different.)

Lucy told THR that she developed the website “for fun” while she was applying for web development jobs, and that she changed the name to “kittenfeed.com” after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the litigious Trump Organization for infringing on the “internationally known and famous” Trump trademark.

Considering First Amendment protections for parody, and the fact that Lucy dropped the name, that should’ve been the end of it, but Lucy says she got hit with a second cease-and-desist letter because her website linked to an anti-Trump shirt available for purchase on Amazon. She then dropped the link and hasn’t heard from the Trump Organization since.

During this time, Lucy’s website has gone from getting 1,200 visitors in the first few weeks to now being so busy that it’s having serious capacity problems—currently, kittenfeed.com is totally inaccessible. So possible legal skirmishes with a sitting president’s company aren’t necessarily bad for business.

 
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