DMCA: Dow What It Wants to Do 

02:00 AM Dec. 31, 2002 PT

Digital Millennium Copyright Act charges may force an independent Internet service provider and its controversial clients offline next month.

The Thing has provided Internet connectivity, technical support and Web design services to New York City artists and political activists for over a decade.

But at the beginning of December, Wolfgang Staehle, owner and director of The Thing, was notified by his service provider, Verio, that The Thing's Internet connection would be severed on Feb. 28, 2003.

Staehle said Verio is pulling the plug on The Thing due to charges that one of its clients violated the DMCA by posting a parody website mocking Dow Chemical company.

Posted on Dec. 3, the parody site quickly came to the attention of Dow's lawyers, who contacted (PDF) Verio. Verio responded by shutting down The Thing's entire network, an action that affected hundreds of The Thing's clients, until the parody site was removed on Dec. 4.

Shortly afterward, Staehle says Verio's lawyers informed him that his service would be permanently suspended at the end of next month.

"I still can't believe it," Staehle said. "I love this city and this country, but I am terrified at the direction we seem to be headed in."

Verio representatives were not immediately available for comment.

The Thing's troubles began when a press release, purportedly from Dow Chemical, was e-mailed to hundreds of people.

The release quoted Dow's then-president, Michael Parker, as saying the company was unconcerned about the lethal gas leak at a Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow) in Bhopal, India, in 1984, that killed thousands. A link was provided to the "Dow-Chemical.com" website.

The company's official website address is dow.com. Dow-Chemical.com was registered by a group of online activists known as the Yes Men, who specialize in creating parody websites.

The Yes Men's parody was put online by RTMark.com, an arts activism group that gets its Internet service from The Thing. Within hours of the site going live, Dow's law firm asked Verio to remove the site.

"But this happened after normal business hours, and when Verio couldn't contact someone here who had authority to pull the site, they totally cut off our service," Staehle said.

"One of my users said it's as if an offensive poster mocking a company was put up on a building, and when the company's lawyers couldn't reach the building owner immediately, they got a bulldozer and knocked down the whole neighborhood," Staehle added.

Verio shut down part of The Thing in 1999, when eToys petitioned a California court to stop an online arts group from using the group's own long-owned URL, etoy.com.

In response, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a Thing client, hit the toy retailer's website with a denial-of-service attack, overwhelming its servers and periodically forcing it offline. Verio blocked access to part of The Thing's network until protestors agreed to call off the attack.

But in January, Verio refused to shut down a website containing DVD-copying software after receiving a request to do so from the Motion Picture Association of America.

So Staehle is hoping that Verio might have a change of heart and says he's yet to receive written notification of his contract severance. But he has also been discussing the possibility of contracting The Thing's Internet service from several European ISPs.

"There are, thankfully, no DMCA-type regulations in Europe yet," Staehle said.

Meanwhile, the parody Dow website has resurfaced on several European websites.

Staehle didn't have to decide whether to keep the site up, as James Parker, son of Dow ex-CEO Michael Parker, has officially claimed ownership of Dow-Chemical.com.

Evidently the Yes Men thought it "would be really funny" if they registered the Dow-Chemical.com under James Parker's name.

"We even put down James Parker's real home address! Very funny, right? Yes! Funny!" the Yes Men said in a statement.

"But on Dec. 4, James Parker himself, with the help of a team of Dow lawyers, sent a Xerox of his driver's license and a letter by FedEx to Gandi.net, saying, basically, "This domain belongs to me. See, that's my home address, too. Give it to me!"

According to rules established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- an organization responsible for, among other chores, Internet address disputes -- Parker was correct and Gandi.net had no legal choice but to hand over Dow-Chemical.com to James Parker.