Anti-corporate pranksters The Yes Men sent out a fake press release "from" Dow Chemical on December 3, the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. After mercilessly imitating the bland tone of "real" press releases denying corporate responsibility for environmental atrocities, the press release gave out the URL of the company web site: Dow-Chemical.com. But that site was a parody, also created by The Yes Men in the same style; the real Dow homepage is at Dow.com.
Dow's legal team sprang into action, making the usual DMCA, cybersquatting, and trademark claims in a cease-and-desist letter sent out the same day. Verio, The Yes Men's upstream ISP, promptly rolled over and took down not only Dow-Chemical.com, but all of Thing.net, the larger activist network on which Dow-Chemical.com had been hosted. This action, by the way, went well beyond what the cease-and-desist letter asked it to do.
But the story doesn't stop there. Dow-Chemical.com won't be coming back, even at another ISP. You see, when The Yes Men registered the domain, they thought it would be funny to use the name and address of the son of the CEO of Dow. A few days later, he got in touch with the registrar and took control of the domain. After all, it was registered to him. Whoops.
Full story and links to other coverage here at The Yes Men's site.
