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Bhopal Bloopers How Dow and Burson-Marsteller made a big stink even stinkier
Joyce Slaton, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, January 9, 2002
©2003 SF Gate
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 900,000 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.