Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

240 BEAM ME UP
Martino, however, finally reached his limit. He had faced too
many grieving families, so he put up a scathing web page on the
observatory web site about star naming. In the year 2000 the ISR
retaliated.
According to Martino, the ISR put quite a bit of legal pressure
on the observatory, which does not have a lot of money. Martino
took down his page, although he was unhappy about it. Martino
says nothing on his site was untrue. Just unflattering.
Martino also notes that the ISR was never directly indicated
anywhere on his page. There was, however, a link at the bottom of
the page about the New York City case, which did mention the
ISR. Apparently, according to Martino, that was still too much for
the company, which again contacted the university, warning them
that the web site should not talk about star naming at all. The situation
was quickly turning into one of First Amendment rights. Martino
felt it was “a case of a consumer advocate being muzzled.”
According to Martino, after this event several astronomers who
had web pages about star-naming companies edited them, prominently
mentioning the First Amendment. Some sites even linked to
a copy of the Constitution.
However, it didn’t end there. Martino took down the web page
but he was still incensed. He made his opinion clear on the Internet
through various mailing lists and bulletin boards. Martino says
the ISR once again contacted the university and insisted they wanted
Martino to cease talking about them, claiming that Martino was
representing himself as a spokesman for the university. This claim,
Martino says, has “no basis whatsoever,” and that his comments
were made on his own time, using his private Internet account
through his own Internet provider, and that the university had nothing
to do with it. Still, the university sent Martino a letter making
it clear that he’d better stop talking about them. Martino wound
up moving the whole page about star naming to his private web site,
where you can still find it at http://home.columbus.rr.com/starfaq.
Martino does extract some small amount of satisfaction, though.
His new star-naming web page gets far more traffic than it did before
the ISR contacted him. Evidently the publicity woke up other
astronomers and they now link to his page as well.