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.

Support the DDA!

[Styx]

The Domain Defense Advocate is a grass-roots organisation trying to combat unwarranted domain confiscations. IMHO, a very worthwhile thing to support.

Re:Support the DDA!

[aka-ed]

Have you viewed the site? Were you confused? For how long? If over a minute, where's your reading comprehension?

It was established some time ago that registering a trademark in order to place a site criticizing the trademark's owner is not "bad faith."

The WTO accused these folks of "harvesting" email addresses, but doesn't say what method they used...according to the site, the only method they used to "harvest" addresses was some "mailto:" links. WTO is annoyed by the mockery and is interpreting the facts to suit themselves.

Computerworld ran an article on this following WTO's party line on this issue so slavishly as to stretch anyone's definition of journalistic ethics. Most interesting is this passage:

The fake WTO site changed its look this afternoon so that it no longer exactly resembles the real WTO Web site.

Even so, the phony site contains so many references to the WTO that some search engines are directing people to it instead of to the official site. A search of AltaVista using the keyword WTO returns www.gatt.org in fifth place.

So, according to the WTO and to an incompetent journalist at Computerworld, establishing an anti-WTO site that shows up fifth in search engines is tantamount to site-jacking!!

Is this the type of reasoning that you wish to defend?

Here are mirrors:

[Saint Aardvark]

http://yesiwill.plagiarist.org

http://detritus/projects/yesiwill

Let's see how well they survive a slashdotting.

Slashdot is

[lavaforge]

The WTO's greatest defense. No one will ever see the offending pages at this rate...

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[hearingaid]

The World Trade Organization is not an ordinary corporation; it's an international UN organization.

Imagine if the Red Cross wanted people to take down websites complaining about people who were infected by HIV via blood transfusions. Get it?

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[Alan Cox]

Well let me see
1. Its not trademarked
2. Its satire which has a special place in copyright law
3. Its political speech. The WTO are trying to censor legitimate protest at their attempts to screw the planet.

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+!

Roll-your-own "Parody" site here...

[Robber Baron]

I like this one better!

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[Zeinfeld]

And I suppose the people that founded the USA never told a lie (the cherry tree legend not withstanding). Why is lying not a legitimate form of protest? It seems to be a legitimate form of political organisations like the WTO.

Why should anyone believe someone who is obviously telling lies? How do you know the truth from the lies?

One of the reasons I have no time for the anti-WTO protestors is that they appear to have no idea what they are protesting about. They completely fail to set out a coherent set of political goals or a strategy to achieve them.

For example amongst the protestors are people complaining that the third world is paid too little for the goods they export to the US and others who are complaining about the loss of US jobs. Denying access to the US markets is not going to help the developing world.

I don't see many of the anti-WTO protestors at the conferences trying to do something positive for the third world. Equally it is a bit odd being lectured on the evils of global capitalism by some teenager wearing a $150 pair of Nike trainers.

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[Mike Schiraldi]

That's ridiculous. First, as others have pointed out, they are using the WTO's trademarked logo. Second, it's not clearly satire. Look at the site -- it looks just like the real thing.

If i post a bunch of messages, claiming to be you, and then say, "Well, it's satire -- people should have been able to understand that the real Alan Cox wouldn't have said such crazy stuff," that's no defense, and it's fraud.

If the site was obviously a parody, i'd support them. But it's not, and i don't.

Re:this is very scary....

[haruharaharu]

if people that are opposing it are already rich

It isn't that the people who oppose this are rich. It's just that only those who are rich can afford to protest regularly all over the world. I'm sure alot of the people who oppose this would love to make hemselves heard, but they have to work at a job most of the time so they can eat.

I especially like the part you quoted where someone on gatt said that, basically, you can't defend people in third world nations because you're richer than they are.

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[banuaba]

that's actually incorrect. Remember Larry Flynt? He said that Jerry Falwell had fucked his mother. His (Flynt's) defense was "would a reasonable person believe that Jerry Falwell had actually fucked his mother" and, of course, the answer was no, therefore it was protected speech, not libel or slander or whichever one.

Re:this is very scary....

[Spy Hunter]

now I realize that 10,000s of people can't all be wrong...

One word - *NSync.

What gets me is this.

[mindstrm]

He was asked to remove it in a letter, in accordance with the DMCA.

THe DMCA lets a copyright holder do this, to protect their work. They can write a letter, and have material taken down.

However... the counter to this is that the person with the site merely has to send a letter back declaring that the information does NOT infringe on their copyrights. They then have a certain number of days to file suit or drop it.

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

[Zeinfeld]

What's also not going to help the developing world is allowing U.S. corporations to exploit third world workers for cheap labor that is prevented by their own poverty and lack of political influence in their own country from unionizing.

Trade is not inevitably exploitation. You sound like the trotskyites used to.

I get the feeling that people want to have opinions on this subject that are simple, easy and comforting. Their real demands have nothing to do with trade, they are demanding that life be as simplistic as their ideology.

I find it interesting that both the posts I have made so far have been moderated up as 'Insightful', then down as 'flamebait' and 'offtopic'. The topic is the gatt.org site so the person who modded me offtopic is simply disagreeing. As for flamebait, it seems that these people don't like hearing any disagreements.

That could explain why they have to create their own WTO site.

Re:Or maybe it is more serious....

[The Cookie Monster]

So what you're saying is that because a few hooligans turned up to start a riot and have some fun, none of the other protesters were there for any legitimate reason?

I hadn't heard of people comming pre-dressed for battle before (but then I don't pay much attentiont to the protests). I'm open to the possibility that there might be a group of protesters who actually think that violence will promote their cause rather than contaminate it, but anyone who isn't the police and actually turns up to a protest in ballistic protective gear, a gas mask, and a balaclava, strikes me as being there (paid even) specifically to discredit the entire protest movement as 'just a bunch of hooligans'.

here's the mike - you tell your story in your words." They wouldn't.

And neither would I, the problems with gobalisation are complex and we live in a sound bite generation. The reporter will choose the most sensational sentence - or even fraction of a sentence and air that (normally completely out of context). You know this is true. If you have no editorial control, you cannot tell your story in your own words.

I hear protesters have cottened onto how poor a job the media do and have started bring their own video cameras to protests. Good on them.

However, as much as I like the angle this parody site is presenting the WTO views from, I do have to agree with you that the WTO probably has a legitimate complaint here.

Re:This is not a question of free speech

[metis]

It is not clearly a parody, and is effectively putting words into the mouth of the body it's targetting.

Putting offensive words in people's mouth is a good definition of parody. Have you watched late night shows lately?

Besides, if the words are so offensive that you know they couldn't have been said by the WTO, then it is a clear parody. Alternatively, if you are not sure that it is the parody then either

• the words are not really so offensive
• You believe that the WTO can make such offensive comment in earnest.

In the second case this isn't just parody but world class top of-the-line fscking Jonathan Swift kind of parody.

Re:"The WTO are trying to censor"

[nagora]

You are confusing "government" with "people". Governments are small (in this case very small) numbers of people who's only contact with democracy, if any, is every four to five years in their own home country. These people know that most of their electorate have no knowledge or even interest in what they do at WTO meetings. They do know, on the other hand, that they're going to have to work with the others at the meeting, in some cases on a daily basis, between now and the next election.

Under those circumstances it is much more likely that everyone will agree rather than rock the boat.

Protesting about things which, after all, rarely affect the politicians' lives, for no gain in their own elections while causing a lot of irritation in their working lives is just not something humans of the sort that enter politics do.

Also remember how much the various protests have affected the lives of those at the meetings: not at all. With layers of armed guards around them, why should the WTO people care about the protesters? That leaves the WTO to only sort out the publication aspects of protest (the web, newspapers, books etc.) in order for everyone involved to have a quiet life, which is mainly what venal people like politicians really want.

TWW