LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Parody domain registration contact info backfires
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Monday, December 30 @ 12:43:02 EST Free Expression
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.

 
Login
Nickname

Password

Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.
Related Links
· The Yes Men
· Dow-Chemical.com
· Dow.com
· cease-and-desist letter
· Thing.net
· here
· More about Free Expression
· News by James Grimmelmann


Most read story about Free Expression:
The Future of Virtual Kiddie Pr0n and Other Notes on Ashcroft v. Free Speech

Options

Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend
"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 0 comments
Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

All stories, comments and submissions copyright their respective posters.
Everything Else Copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.
This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).