This is a story about how hard it is to shut someone up online,
and how it's sometimes a bad idea to even try, because it lets
everyone know you're trying to hide something. It's also a story
about pranksters taking political action by making people laugh.
Here's what happened: Dow Chemical and Dow's PR firm,
Burson-Marsteller, tried to shut down some parody sites and ended up
bringing themselves a heap of negative publicity. But before we go
into that, first, a little background:
Back in 1984, the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide made a big whoopsie with
some deadly gas used in making pesticides. After a gas tank was
accidentally breached, Bhopal's 9000,000 residents were exposed to
some 40 tons of the known carcinogen methyl isocyanate. Up to 4,000
people (figures vary) were killed on the spot, and anywhere from
100,000 to 200,000 still suffer from serious, potentially deadly
health effects such as cancer and respiratory problems.
What was arguably the world's most horrific industrial disaster
soon gave rise to a massive lawsuit, and Union Carbide was ordered
to pay $470 million into a victims' fund set up by the Indian
government. Bhopal victims correctly called it a "pittance" -- the
average payout to almost 560,000 survivors who received settlements
as of June 2001 was $580. Even worse, Union Carbide was not forced
to clean up the chemicals that leaked unabated from the
now-abandoned Bhopal factory site.
Fast-forward to 2001: Union Carbide merged with Dow Chemical Co.,
makers of the Vietnam War's notorious Agent Orange, and Dow took on
Union Carbide's plants, business processes and customers. It also
took on the company's neglect of the Bhopal situation. Dow continues
to refuse to clean up the Bhopal site, denying liability and
refusing to release precise details of the chemicals released during
the accident, which could help treat those who remain ill.
Carcinogens and other poisons continue to leach into underground
drinking water, and the Bhopal death toll continues to mount.
Enter the Yes Men, a group of Internet activists, pranksters and
philosophers who gained some notoriety years back by posting
satirical sites about the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Some of the Yes Men
started hearing stories about Bhopal and icky things about Dow
Chemical and Burson-Marsteller -- the firm whose crisis-management
practice helped Union Carbide minimize its PR damage after Bhopal.
Not content with just passing said icky things on to their activist
friends, the Yes Men wanted to cast some light on Dow's current
actions.
On December 3, 2002, the 18th anniversary of Bhopal, the Yes Men
posed as Dow representatives and sent out a cleverly snitty e-mail
press-release "explanation" of its actions to journalists and
activists, made all the more stinging because of how closely the
parody rings true. The fake
release is a masterwork of irony, quoting a Dow spokesperson as
saying, "We understand the anger and hurt. But Dow does not and
cannot acknowledge responsibility. If we did, not only would we be
required to expend many billions of dollars on cleanup and
compensation ..."
The fake release was immediately forwarded around the world, and
the Yes Men put up a fake-yet-official-looking Web site at http://www.dow-chemical.com/
to showcase the release, which received hundreds of enraged e-mail
responses from those who didn't realize the site, which strongly
resembled Dow's corporate site, was a spoof. The flap was reported
in national and international news sources, and the Dow parody site
got hundreds of thousands of hits -- and it wasn't long before Dow
also came calling.
Within a day of the release, Dow threatened the http://www.dow-chemical.com/
upstream provider, Verio. Under the rules of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, Dow's legal reps said, the Yes Men's site violated
Dow's copyright in Web design, images and text. Chastened, Verio
shut the Yes Men's ISP, Thing.net, down for 24 hours and informed
the tiny ISP that it'd have to find itself a new backbone provider.
In the meantime, Dow did some swift legal maneuvering. The company
discovered that the prankish Yes Men had actually registered http://www.dow-chemical.com/
in the name of the son of former Dow President Michael Parker as a
joke. Parker's kid did his dad's company a favor and claimed the
site from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), arguing successfully that the site was, after all,
registered in his name. If you click on http://www.dow-chemical.com/,
you'll see it now redirects to Dow's official site. The original Yes
Men parody site, however, is still mirrored elsewhere.
Meanwhile, yet another thread in the story was developing
elsewhere. In the midst of writing a paper on the WTO, Hampshire
College student Paul Hardwin inadvertently ended up at a Yes Men
parody page. He liked what he saw and decided to use a Yes Men
software program, an automatic site-parody production tool called
(heh, heh) Reamweaver, to create a site spoofing Burson-Marsteller.
It wasn't a particularly brutal parody -- Reamweaver acts as a
"fun-house mirror," allowing spoofers to duplicate a site while
substituting certain words or phrases for others. Hardwin's spoof
was a pretty tame takeoff of Burson-Marsteller's site.
But when Burson-Marsteller saw Hardwin's parody site, it
immediately filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO). Yeah, it was just "a simple little parody
site," as Hardwin called it, but he'd posted his little site at http://www.bursonmarsteller.com/,
which Burson-Marsteller complained was confusingly similar to its
own trademarked domain name, http://www.bm.com/.
Hardwin got a little hot under the collar when Burson-Marsteller
filed its complaint, and
he beefed his anti-Burson-Marsteller page up massively. Instead of
being a simple little site parody, the page now discusses
Burson-Marsteller's purported wrongdoings for a variety of clients,
from Philip Morris to Monsanto to Union Carbide. At press time the
blistering page was still hosted at http://www.bursonmarsteller.com/,
but it will soon be moved to http://www.bmfacts.com/ because
the WIPO decided Dec. 13 that Hardwin was indeed illicitly squatting
on a domain name that rightfully belonged to Burson-Marsteller.
To sum up, both the Yes Men and Paul Hardwin created sites that
poked fun at big corporations for alleged wrongdoings. Both the Yes
Men and Hardwin were forced to take their content off domains where
it was decided they were squatting, but both sites are still alive
and well at other domains. And, most important, both the Yes Men and
Hardwin received widespread attention for their parodies and
subsequent swift corporate suppression. In the Yes Men's case, their
story was covered by tickled journalists from the London
Times, The New York Times and many other sources and
organizations, including Greenpeace.
The upshot is that thousands upon thousands more people heard
about Bhopal and the shameful conduct of both Dow and
Burson-Marsteller than would have had the stung corporations not
chosen to respond with threats. If Dow and Burson-Marsteller had
simply ignored the sites, few people would have ever heard of them.
Instead, Dow and Burson-Marsteller brought down a chorus of
snickering and scorn upon themselves -- and a whole lot of attention
to aspects of their businesses they'd probably rather be kept quiet.
"BM would have been so much better off just leaving my original
mild parody site as is," Paul Hardwin says, while Yes Men
conspirator Mike Bonanno says Dow "made a big deal out of something
small, and now, ironically, it is a big deal. Our ultimate
goal of bringing attention to Bhopal is accomplished!"
Let that be a lesson to all those big companies out there that
don't like it when a couple pissed-off people say what they like and
it's read by millions. Hush it up, and the furor only gets louder.
Now that you know a little more about Bhopal, Dow and
Burson-Marsteller, you can consider yourself part of the furor, too.