Visit the amazing parody site at http://www.dowethics.com/r/Homepage/index.html
before the Forces of Evil have it silenced.
Jim
---
December 13, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Paul Hardwin: mailto:phardwin@yurt.org
DowEthics.com:
mailto:info@dowethics.com
DOW, BURSON-MARSTELLER CLAMP DOWN ON FAKE WEBSITES
But
companies find it harder to stifle criticism
Two giant companies are struggling to shut down parody
websites that
portray them unfavorably, interrupting
internet use for thousands in
the process, and filing a
lawsuit that pits the formidable legal
department of PR
giant Burson-Marsteller against a freshman at
Hampshire
College.
The activists behind the fake corporate websites have
fought back, and
obtained substantial publicity in the
process.
Fake websites have been used by activists before, but
Dow-Chemical.com
and BursonMarsteller.com represent the
first time that such websites
have successfully been used
to publicize abuses by specific
corporations.
A December 3 press release originating from one of the
fake sites,
Dow-Chemical.com, explained the "real"
reasons that Dow could not take
responsibility for the
Bhopal catastrophe, which has resulted in an
estimated
20,000 deaths over the years
(http://www.theyesmen.org/dow/#release).
"Our prime responsibilities
are to the people who own Dow
shares, and to the industry as a whole,"
the release
stated. "We cannot do anything for the people of
Bhopal."
The fake site immediately received thousands of
outraged e-mails
(http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/email.htm).
Within hours, the real Dow sent a legal threat to
Dow-Chemical.com's
upstream provider, Verio, prompting
Verio to shut down the fake Dow's
ISP for nearly a day,
closing down hundreds of unrelated websites and
bulletin
boards in the process.
The fake Dow website quickly resurfaced at an ISP in
Australia.
(http://theyesmen.org/dow/#threat)
In a comical anticlimax, Dow then used a little-known
domain-name rule
to take possession of
Dow-Chemical.com
(http://theyesmen.org/dow/#story), another
move which backfired when
amused journalists wrote
articles in newspapers from The New York
Times to The
Hindu in India (http://theyesmen.org/dow/#links),
and
sympathetic activists responded by cloning and
mirroring the site at
many locations, including http://www.dowethics.com//,
http://www.dowindia.com// and, with a
twist,
http://www.mad-dow-disease.com//. Dow
continues to play whack-a-mole
with these sites (at least
one ISP has received veiled threats).
Burson-Marsteller, the public relations company that
helped to "spin"
Bhopal, has meanwhile sued college
student Paul Hardwin
(mailto:phardwin@yurt.org) for putting up a
fake Burson-Marsteller
site, http://www.bursonmarsteller.com//, which
recounted how the PR
giant helped to downplay the Bhopal
disaster. Burson-Marsteller's suit
against Hardwin will
be heard next week by the World Intellectual
Property
Organization (http://reamweaver.com/bmwipo/wipo.html).
Hardwin, unable to afford a lawyer, has composed a dryly
humorous
57-page rebuttal to the PR giant's
lawsuit
(http://www.reamweaver.com/bmwipo/response.htm#reality).
On page 7,
for instance, the student notes that
Burson-Marsteller's "stated goal
is 'to ensure that the
perceptions which surround our clients and
influence
their stakeholders are consistent with reality.'" Hardwin
goes on to assert that his satirical domain is doing
precisely that,
by publicizing "academic and
journalistic materials about
Burson-Marsteller's
involvement with and relationship to, for example,
Philip
Morris and the National Smoker's Alliance, a consumer
front
group designed to create the appearance of public
support for
big-tobacco policies; Union Carbide and the
deaths of 20,000 people
following the 1984 disaster in
Bhopal; and political regimes such as
that of Romanian
dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and more recently Saudi
Arabia
following the events of September 11; and to properly
associate
them with the relevant Trademark so that they
may be understood
accordingly by Internet users."
In response to the suit's claim that "a substantial
degree of goodwill
is associated with " Hardwin offers
much "evidence to the
contrary" including "a newspaper headline in
which the
Complainant is characterized as 'the Devil.'"
The primary goal of RTMark (http://rtmark.com//) is to
publicize
corporate subversion of the democratic process.
Just like other
corporations, it achieves its aims by any
and all means at its
disposal. RTMark has previously
helped to publicize websites against
political parties
(http://rtmark.com/othersites.html#fpo),
political
figures (http://www.rtmark.com/bush.html), and
entities like the World
Trade Organization (http://www.gatt.org/) and the World
Economic Forum
(http://www.world-economic-forum.com/).
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