NEWSgrist: *THING.net evicted by Dow, Verio*
- Supplement to Vol. 3, no.
21 (Dec. 24,
2002)
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NEWSgrist
where
spin is art
{bi-weekly
news digest}
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Supplement
to Vol. 3, no. 21 (Dec. 24,
2002)
============================
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CONTENTS:
-
*Quote/s* no alternatives
- *Sound the Alarm* The Thing,
evicted?
- *How Now?* The Dow story
from
Greenpeace to Slashdot
- *Url/s* Dow parody + mirror sites
- *De-Activated* RTMark press
release
- *War Paint* Mirapaul's take on things
- *Fee! Fie! Fo! Fum!* fighting
back
- *X-mas Epilogue* a few words from
Brett Stalbaum
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*Quote/s*
"There really are no true
alternative Internet service providers because
connectivity is still controlled by
the telecommunication companies."
-- Alex
Galloway, artist (see *War Paint* below)
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*Sound
the Alarm*
VERIO SETS OFF FREE THOUGHT ALARM
AGAINST THE THING
posted by Rachel Greene, 12/24/02
Rhizome - http://www.rhizome.org/
Advocate of online art and culture
since 1991, The Thing, may have it's
pipeline terminated by provider
Verio. This termination, scheduled for
February, could affect hundreds of
sites and users, many of them
artists, activists or art-related
businesses. Verio lawyers told Thing
founder Wolfgang Staehle that their
contract for service was unilaterally
null and void because of
"violations" -- likely the parody site http://dow-chemical.com/
by the Yes Men, and perhaps the
persistently provocative campaigns
of Rtmark or the Electronic
Disturbance Theater (both hosted by The
Thing). How to stand up for
services geared towards artists and
activists? Write to Verio and
express your outrage, and make a
contribution to The Thing:
https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
Staehle is looking for new
pipelines as you read this.
============================
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*How
Now?*
Dow, Verio evict Bhopal activists
from the Web
The
Digital Opportunity Channel (New Delhi) - Dec. 24, 2002:
http://www.digitalopportunity.org/fulltext/bhopal20021224.shtml
DOW
Threatens Verio, Verio silences activists
Slashdot
- December 23,
@08:16AM:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/23/1316239&mode=thread&tid=153
How low can Dow go? Dow sues
penniless Bhopal survivors
Greenpeace - Mon 23 December
2002:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/news/details?news_id=95504
Dow
explains Bhopal
RTMark -
Dec 13, 2002:
http://www.rtmark.com/dowpr.html
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*Url/s*
Dow
parody + parody mirror sites:
http://dow-chemical.va.com.au/
http://bhopal.doesntexist.com/
http://a.parsons.edu/~byfield/msc/dow-chem-index.html
http://www.existech.com/cultural_criticisms/dow-chemical.com/
http://home.achilles.net/~kebera/endangered-expression.html
Reamweaver:
Reamweaver has everything you need
to instantly "funhouse-mirror"
anyone's
website, copying the real-time "look and feel" but letting you
change any
words, images, etc. that you choose. (Examples:
WEForum.org, WhiteHouse.gov, RNC.org, WTO.org,
CNN.com,
Monsanto.com,
etc.)
============================
============================
*De-Activated*
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE - December 23,
2002
ACTIVIST NETWORK IN NY EVICTED FROM INTERNET BY DOW, VERIO
http://www.rtmark.com/thingpr.html
Bowing
to pressure from the Dow Chemical Corporation, the internet
company Verio has
booted the activist-oriented Thing.net from the Web.
Internet service
provider Thing.net has been the primary service
provider for activist and
artist organizations in the New York area
for 10 years.
On December 3,
activists used a server housed by Thing.net to post a
parody Dow press
release on the eighteenth anniversary of the disaster
in which 20,000 people
died as a result of an accident at a Union
Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.
(Union Carbide is now owned by Dow.)
The deadpan statement, which many people
took as real, explained
that
Dow could not accept responsibility for the disaster due to its
primary
allegiance to its shareholders and to its bottom line.
Dow was not
amused, and sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA)
complaint to Verio, which immediately cut Thing.net off the
internet
for fifteen hours. A few days later, Verio announced that
Thing.net
had 60 days to move to another provider before being shut
down
permanently, unilaterally terminating Thing.netīs 7-year-old
contract.
Affected
organizations include PS1/MOMA, Artforum, Nettime,
Tenant.net
(which assists renters facing eviction), and hundreds more.
"Verio's
actions are nothing short of outrageous," said Wolfgang
Staehle, Thing.net
Executive Director. "They could have resolved the
matter with the Dow
parodists directly; instead they chose to shut
down our entire network. This
self-appointed enforcement of the DMCA
could have a serious chilling effect
on free speech, and has already
damaged our business."
RTMark, which
publicizes corporate abuses of democracy, is housed on
Thing.net. Please
visit https://secure.thing.net/backbone /
to help
Thing.net survive Dow's and Verio's actions, and to develop a plan
to
avoid such problems in the future.
Contact: thing-group@rtmark.com
============================
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*War
Paint*
Cyberspace Artists Paint Themselves
Into a Corner
By MATTHEW
MIRAPAUL
NYTimes ARTS ONLINE, December 23,
2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/arts/design/23ARTS.html?pagewanted=all&position=topv
In a 1950's horror movie the Thing
was a creature that killed before it
was killed. Now in a real-life
drama playing on a computer screen near
you, the Thing is an Internet
service provider that is having trouble
staying alive. Some might find this
tale equally terrifying.
The Thing provides Internet
connections for dozens of New York artists
and arts organizations, and its
liberal attitude allows its clients to
exhibit online works that other
providers might immediately unplug.
As a result the Thing is struggling
to survive online. Its own Internet-
connection provider is planning to
disconnect the Thing over problems
created by the Thing's clients.
While it may live on, its crisis illustrates
how difficult it can be for
Internet artists to find a platform from which
they can push the medium's
boundaries.
Wolfgang Staehle, the Thing's
founder and executive director, said the
high-bandwidth pipeline connecting
the Thing to the Internet would be
severed on Feb. 28 because its
customers had repeatedly violated the
pipeline provider's policies. While
the exact abuses are not known, they
probably involve the improper use
of corporate trademarks and gener-
ating needless traffic on other
sites.
If Mr. Staehle is unable to
establish a new pipeline, the 100 Web sites
and 200 individual customers,
mostly artists, that rely on the Thing for
Internet service could lose their
cyberspace homes. In a telephone
interview from the Thing's office
in Chelsea, Mr. Staehle (pronounced
SHTAW-luh) said, "It's not fair
that 300 of our clients will suffer from
this and I might be out of
business."
The Thing's pipeline is currently
supplied by Verio Inc. of Englewood,
Colo., which declines to comment on
its troubles with the Thing. Mr.
Staehle said that he had not
received official word from Verio, but that
the company's lawyers told the
Thing the service would be cut off
because of the
violations.
For some digital artists, these are
perilous times. With the Internet's
rise have come increased concerns
about everything from online privacy
to digital piracy. Naturally
artists are addressing these matters in
Internet-based works. So an online
project about copyright violations
inevitably violates some
copyrights, and a work that warns how a
computer could be spying on you
could very well be spying on you.
Most Internet service providers
yank such works offline whenever legal
challenges are raised, so
open-minded providers like the Thing become
an important alternative. But as
Alex Galloway, a New York artist, said,
"There really are no true
alternative Internet service providers because
connectivity is still controlled by
the telecommunication companies."
Mr. Staehle has learned this the
hard way. The project that overheated
Verio's circuits was probably a Web
site created by an online group of
political activists called the Yes
Men. The site, at dow-chemical.com,
resembled Dow Chemical's real site,
at dow.com. But the contents were
phony news releases and speeches
that ridiculed Dow officials for being
more interested in profits than in
making reparations for a lethal gas
leak at a Union Carbide plant (now
owned by Dow) in Bhopal, India, in
1984.
The hoax's supporters said it was a
parody. But Dow's lawyers
contacted Verio to complain that
the site infringed on its trademarks,
among other sins. Initially it
seemed to be just another fracas over
corporate logos and other forms of
intellectual property on the Internet.
What happened next stunned Mr.
Staehle. The Yes Men project had
been put online by RTMark.com, a politically
active arts group that
uses the Web as its base and gets its Internet
service from the Thing.
After Dow complained about the fake
Web site, Mr. Staehle said, Verio
alerted the Thing, where a
technician said he was not authorized to act.
Within hours Verio cut off access
to RTMark.com, as well as to all the
Thing's Internet customers. These
included innocent victims like
Artforum magazine and the P. S. 1
Contemporary Art Center in Long
Island City, Queens. Starting
mid-evening on Dec. 4, the Thing was
offline for 16
hours.
Ted Byfield, a Thing board member
who teaches a course at the
Parsons School of Design on the
social effects of technology, would
not call Verio's action censorship.
Instead he said, "They hit the panic
button." He compared the temporary
shutdown to a meat packer
who recalls all his beef products
after discovering a small batch of
tainted
hamburger.
Mr. Staehle soon discovered that
his virtual supermarket might be
permanently closed, too. When he
called Verio to ask why his entire
network had been unplugged instead
of the sole offending site, he said,
a Verio lawyer told him that the
Thing had violated its policies
repeatedly and that its contract
would be terminated.
Verio had shut down part of the
Thing once before. In 1999 the online
toy retailer eToys.com asked a
California court to stop an online arts
group from using its longtime Web
address etoy.com. The Electronic
Disturbance Theater, a Thing
client, staged a virtual protest by
overloading the retailer's site
with traffic during the holiday season.
Verio blocked access to one of the
Thing's computers until the protest
site's owners agreed to take it
offline.
These two episodes may give Verio
enough cause to bump the Thing
from the Internet. If so Verio
would appear to be a surprising censor. In
January the company earned praise
from Internet-rights supporters
when it refused to grant a request
by the Motion Picture Association of
America to shut down a Web site
containing DVD-copying software.
Mr. Staehle said he had no
knowledge of the Yes Men site. "I am not in
the business of policing my
clients," he said. "I am just a carrier."
Although some Thing customers
pursue a radical political agenda, most
do not. Even RTMark.com was
included in the Internet-art section of
the 2000 Whitney Biennial
exhibition.
One might assume that museums and
other cultural organizations could
provide a safe haven for
challenging works. But they are just as
susceptible to legal threats and
technical restrictions. For instance, in
May the New Museum of Contemporary
Art in New York was forced to
remove a surveillance-theme artwork
from the Internet after its service
provider said it violated its
policies.
Mr. Staehle said he was considering
several plans that would keep the
Thing alive. While he is confident
that he will find another pipeline
provider, he said, he is worried
that customers will abandon the Thing
during the transition, financially
ruining it.
The Thing is one of the oldest
advocates of online culture. Mr. Staehle,
who moved to New York from his
native Germany in 1976, started the
Thing in 1991 as an electronic
bulletin board where artists could
exchange ideas about how the new
medium would affect the arts. The
electronic forum continues at
bbs.thing.net, where artists post projects
and review
works.
Charles Guarino, Artforum's
associate publisher, said that should the
Thing vanish, "it would be a
terrible loss." But he noted that the Thing's
customers would simply find new, if
less sympathetic, Internet service
providers. Mr. Guarino said,
"Everyone will still continue to exist,
probably even the people who got
them into all this trouble in the first
place." He added, "Poor
thing."
THE THING: http://bbs.thing.net/
RTMark: http://www.rtmark.com/
============================
============================
*Fee! Fie! Fo!
Fum!*
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - December
13, 2002
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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/email.htm).
Within
hours, the real Dow sent a legal threat to Dow-Chemical.comīs
upstream
provider, Verio, prompting Verio to shut down the fake Dowīs
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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://theyesmen.org/dow/#links),
and
sympathetic activists responded by cloning and mirroring the site
at
many locations, including http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.dowethics.com/,
http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.dowindia.com/
and, with a twist,
http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.bursonmarsteller.com/,
which recounted how the PR
giant helped to downplay the Bhopal disaster.
Burson-Marstellerīs suit
against Hardwin will be heard next week by the World
Intellectual
Property Organization (http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://reamweaver.com/bmwipo/wipo.html).
Hardwin,
unable to afford a lawyer, has composed a dryly humorous
57-page rebuttal to
the PR giantīs lawsuit
(http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.reamweaver.com/bmwipo/response.htm#reality).
On page 7,
for instance, the student notes that Burson-Marstellerīs "stated
goal
is īto ensure that the perceptions which surround our clients
and
influence their stakeholders are consistent with reality.ī" Hardwin
goes on to assert that his satirical domain is doing precisely that,
by
publicizing "academic and journalistic materials about
Burson-Marstellerīs
involvement with and relationship to, for example,
Philip Morris and the
National Smokerīs 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 suitīs
claim that "a substantial degree of goodwill
is associated with [the
Burson-Marstellar Trademark]" Hardwin offers
much "evidence to the contrary"
including "a newspaper headline in
which the Complainant is characterized as
īthe Devil.ī"
The primary goal of RTMark (http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?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://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://rtmark.com/othersites.html#fpo),
political
figures (http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.rtmark.com/bush.html),
and entities like the World
Trade Organization (http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.gatt.org)
and the World Economic Forum
(http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.world-economic-forum.com).
# distributed via <nettime>:
no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing
list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics
of the nets
# more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info
nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://bbs.thing.net/@1040758046E572GE3tjTmhim@/links/jump.thing?http://www.nettime.org
contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
============================
============================
*X-mas
Epilogue*
THING.NET EVICTED FROM INTERNET
(fwd)
Brett Stalbaum
<beestal@cadre.sjsu.edu>
Rhizome: posted
12-23-02
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?13521
Keywords:
censorship
Genre: net,
org
Type: commentary
If this press release from rtmark
is as stated (I have no reason to think
it is not), then clearly the DMCA
is being implemented for political ends
in a pretty daring way. Taking down
an entire ISP (and all unrelated
accounts) for the actions of just
one of its clients is probably a prima
facie affront to the first
amendment all by itself. But when taken in the
context of the kinds of activist
work supported by thing, well, lets just
say we know who the targets are. It
could hardly be more blatant.
There are a lot of ISPs out there,
no doubt, who have had DMCA
complaints against individual
hosting clients. I wonder how many have
been uncoupled from the
backbone?
I'd like to add a few other
examples to rtmark's list to make for
overkill on the previous
point.
Ricardo
Dominguez
Coco Fusco
http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/
Not to mention any number of
anti-war projects hosted on thing.
Good timing,
no?
But the action here of cutting the
root to kill the offending leaves also
takes with it any number of
non-activist art projects. Thing hosts a
1998 work of my own that is in no
way in an activist mode.
(http://www.thing.net/~beestal ). To get
an overall sense, check
out bbs.thing.net and check out the
variety of art sites they host.
Maybe wish them a good-bye or some
good luck.
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