The Times: Tech column - Yes Men hoax/Top web searches
By David Rowan
A few days ago an e-mail press release went out ostensibly from dow chemical.com containing a startling insight into the company's limited response to the 1984 Bhopal disaster. "We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," it quoted Dow's departing president, Michael D. Parker, as saying about its Union Carbide subsidiary's most enduring legacy.
"This just isn't true," it said. "Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step."
The statement's cold complacency soon provoked hundreds of furious e-mail responses, particularly from those who had visited the dow-chemical.com website. As word spread, the slick website - boasting that Dow was "Aiming for zero responsibility" - received a reported 250,000 hits in three days. There was one problem: Dow Chemical had nothing to do with it. Both the press release and the related website were the latest anti-corporate project of The Yes Men, a group of online activists who specialise in creating web parodies of those that they resent. The real Dow, naturally, was furious: but its lawyers soon found a useful tool with which to fight back.
The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in 1998 to give Hollywood and the recording studios greater control over their digital content. But increasingly the DMCA's wide provisions are being used as a tool of corporate censorship -whether to prevent price-comparison websites indexing a retailer's offers or to silence critics of the Church of Scientology. So Dow's lawyers put in a DMCA claim that the spoof site breached its copyright in web design, images and text, and forced The Yes Men's internet service provider to take the parody offline.
Whether you appreciate such anti-corporate mischief-making, the Act's ever wider use continues a worrying trend for copyright law to be used to silence dissent. Effectively, the DCMA is being used to suppress free speech.
In the event, Dow found a rather more obvious way to wrest control of the site: as a joke, the pranksters had registered it in the name of Parker's son James, who then proceeded to claim it. It now redirects to Dow's official site -although the company has still not caught up with dozens more mirror sites. And why, you may wonder, did Dow's Bhopal PR advisers, Burson-Marsteller, not warn the firm to register all Dow-related web domains? Don't look to bursonmarsteller.com for an answer. That's been nabbed by yet another parody site.
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The west may be bracing for war, but the single most important thought on web users' minds in 2002 has been...a cult Japanese cartoon called Dragonball. According to Lycos, Dragonball has been the year's most searched-for term for the second year running, followed by the KaZaA file-swapping software at number two and then, more worryingly, by tattoos. Both Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson make the Lycos top 10, but Osama bin Laden is down from number 5 last year to 60.
Over at Google, an analysis of 55 billion searches this year suggests that Eminem is the most inquired-after man, Jennifer Lopez the most searched-for woman, and Ferrari the year's top brand. In a remarkable coup for British sportsmanship, David Beckham has beaten Anna Kournikova to be the world's top requested athlete. And as for British surfers' own top 10 Google queries for 2002, in descending order they are: BBC; Big Brother; easyJet; Britney Spears; Ryanair; Gareth Gates; weather; Kylie Minogue; World Cup; and Holly Valance. I'll leave it to the nation's media studies departments to tell us what it all means.
(The Times, December 17 2002)
A few days ago an e-mail press release went out ostensibly from dow chemical.com containing a startling insight into the company's limited response to the 1984 Bhopal disaster. "We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," it quoted Dow's departing president, Michael D. Parker, as saying about its Union Carbide subsidiary's most enduring legacy.
"This just isn't true," it said. "Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step."
The statement's cold complacency soon provoked hundreds of furious e-mail responses, particularly from those who had visited the dow-chemical.com website. As word spread, the slick website - boasting that Dow was "Aiming for zero responsibility" - received a reported 250,000 hits in three days. There was one problem: Dow Chemical had nothing to do with it. Both the press release and the related website were the latest anti-corporate project of The Yes Men, a group of online activists who specialise in creating web parodies of those that they resent. The real Dow, naturally, was furious: but its lawyers soon found a useful tool with which to fight back.
The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in 1998 to give Hollywood and the recording studios greater control over their digital content. But increasingly the DMCA's wide provisions are being used as a tool of corporate censorship -whether to prevent price-comparison websites indexing a retailer's offers or to silence critics of the Church of Scientology. So Dow's lawyers put in a DMCA claim that the spoof site breached its copyright in web design, images and text, and forced The Yes Men's internet service provider to take the parody offline.
Whether you appreciate such anti-corporate mischief-making, the Act's ever wider use continues a worrying trend for copyright law to be used to silence dissent. Effectively, the DCMA is being used to suppress free speech.
In the event, Dow found a rather more obvious way to wrest control of the site: as a joke, the pranksters had registered it in the name of Parker's son James, who then proceeded to claim it. It now redirects to Dow's official site -although the company has still not caught up with dozens more mirror sites. And why, you may wonder, did Dow's Bhopal PR advisers, Burson-Marsteller, not warn the firm to register all Dow-related web domains? Don't look to bursonmarsteller.com for an answer. That's been nabbed by yet another parody site.
++++
The west may be bracing for war, but the single most important thought on web users' minds in 2002 has been...a cult Japanese cartoon called Dragonball. According to Lycos, Dragonball has been the year's most searched-for term for the second year running, followed by the KaZaA file-swapping software at number two and then, more worryingly, by tattoos. Both Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson make the Lycos top 10, but Osama bin Laden is down from number 5 last year to 60.
Over at Google, an analysis of 55 billion searches this year suggests that Eminem is the most inquired-after man, Jennifer Lopez the most searched-for woman, and Ferrari the year's top brand. In a remarkable coup for British sportsmanship, David Beckham has beaten Anna Kournikova to be the world's top requested athlete. And as for British surfers' own top 10 Google queries for 2002, in descending order they are: BBC; Big Brother; easyJet; Britney Spears; Ryanair; Gareth Gates; weather; Kylie Minogue; World Cup; and Holly Valance. I'll leave it to the nation's media studies departments to tell us what it all means.
(The Times, December 17 2002)
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