A Distorted Mirror: Automatic, Real-Time Web Parodies

Citing the DMCA, the World Trade Organization complained to Verio, the upstream provider of parody site gatt.org, a site we've mentioned before which jabs at the aims and methods of GATT and the WTO. Verio notified domain holder Jonathan Prince of the complaint, and asked Prince to remove any copyrighted materials from the site. The site appears intact for now, but read on to learn about the interesting software the complaint has spawned -- perhaps this isn't what the WTO had in mind.

As Andrew Bichlbaum writes: "The WTO could well have stepped on a hornets' nest. To counter the attack, Gatt.org managers The Yes Men have released a piece of open-source 'parodyware' that will 'forever make this kind of censorship obsolete. ... Using this software, it takes five minutes to set up a convincing, personalized, evolving parody of the WTO.org website, or any other website of your choice ... All you need is a place to put it -- say, WTOO.org, WorldTradeOrg.com, whatever.'"

Comments

On a serious note, though,

[SumDeusExMachina]

Won't this just encourage corporations to sue over copyright infringement even more? I mean, Apple was able to sue over "look and feel", so what would bar these people from doing the same? Also, how in the world is software going to be able to tell copyrighted material from non-copyrighted material? This all seems to be rather ill-planned to me.

beyond the golden parachute

[apwingo]

these guys and gals, the yes men, do some seriously, seriously cool stuff. in the november issue of harper's, they print a transcript of a talk that these folks were invited to give at a textiles conference in Tampere, Finland, from folks that thought that they really were the WTO. A few snippets:

... How do we at the WTO fit in? Well, that's easy: We want to help you acieve those dollar results. We want to help make sure that nothing - protectionism, worry, even violence against physical property - stands in the way of your dollar results.

and some more:

... CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR: PROTECTIONISM
[Slide: Freedom]
Why did people fight and die and lose money? It comes down to one word: FREEDOM.
[Slide: Southern Happiness]
By the 1860s, the South was utterly flush with cash. It had recently benefited from the cotton gin, an invention that took the seeds out of cotton and the South out of its preindustrial past. Hundreds of thousands of workers, previously unemployed in their countries of origin, were given useful jobs in textiles. Into this rosy picture of freedom and boom stepped ... you guessed it: the NORTH.

it goes on, about how the market would have stopped slavery ("Involuntarily Imported Workforce") given time, moving production to the third world where things are cheaper, then it gets wack:

Now, we all known that not even the best workplace design can help even the most astute manage keep track odf hstaff. But our solution inables a lot more rapport with remote workers.
Mike, would you please?
[Unruh steps out from behind the podium to a drum roll. An assistant grabs him by the tie and belt and rips off his suit to reveal a golden spandex unitard underneath.]
Ah! That's better! This is the Management Leisure suit. This is the WTO's answer to the problems of maintaining rapport with distant workers and maintaining one's own mental health as a manager with the proper amount of leisure. How does the MLS work, besides being comfortable? Allow me to describe the suit's core features.
[Unruh unzips the from of the suit, then pulls on a rip cord that inflates a three-foot-long golden phallus. The audience claps.]

And it goes on.

The presentation, which Harper's describes as "well-received", was subsequently praised by the MC on three seperate occasions that day.

(I want to be a yes man :)

Reminds me of the Dialectizer...

[Zergwyn]

It seems sort of like a bigger versioin of the Dialectizer, a site that allows you to insert a url and then have all the text on the page translated into a number of amusing "languages," such as redneck, jive, elmer fudd, etc. /. readers may especially appreciate the hacker dialect. ^_^ Try this version of slashdot!(hit the dialectize button). CmdrTaco's gone l33+!