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?

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+!

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.