Back on December 4, Conan O'Brien was doing one of the crazy ad libs he specializes in on his late night t.v. show, and off the top of his head threw out the name of a non-existent website: HornyManatee.com.
In doing so he unwittingly created the potential for enormous legal problems. As Jacques Steinberg, television critic at the New York Times explains it:
"(A)s 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."
Once the network had the license to the site, O'Brien and his colleagues went to work and actually put it together. Since then, hornymanatee.com has gotten over three million hits. Check it out here.
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