A Distorted Mirror: Automatic, Real-Time Web Parodies

Citing the DMCA, the World Trade Organization complained to Verio, the upstream provider of parody site gatt.org, a site we've mentioned before which jabs at the aims and methods of GATT and the WTO. Verio notified domain holder Jonathan Prince of the complaint, and asked Prince to remove any copyrighted materials from the site. The site appears intact for now, but read on to learn about the interesting software the complaint has spawned -- perhaps this isn't what the WTO had in mind.

As Andrew Bichlbaum writes: "The WTO could well have stepped on a hornets' nest. To counter the attack, Gatt.org managers The Yes Men have released a piece of open-source 'parodyware' that will 'forever make this kind of censorship obsolete. ... Using this software, it takes five minutes to set up a convincing, personalized, evolving parody of the WTO.org website, or any other website of your choice ... All you need is a place to put it -- say, WTOO.org, WorldTradeOrg.com, whatever.'"

On a serious note, though,

Won't this just encourage corporations to sue over copyright infringement even more? I mean, Apple was able to sue over "look and feel", so what would bar these people from doing the same? Also, how in the world is software going to be able to tell copyrighted material from non-copyrighted material? This all seems to be rather ill-planned to me.

Support the DDA!

The Domain Defense Advocate [ajax.org] is a grass-roots organisation trying to combat unwarranted domain confiscations. IMHO, a very worthwhile thing to support.

Re:Support the DDA!

Have you viewed the site [gatt.org]? Were you confused? For how long? If over a minute, where's your reading comprehension?

It was established some time ago that registering a trademark in order to place a site criticizing the trademark's owner is not "bad faith."

The WTO accused these folks of "harvesting" email addresses, but doesn't say what method they used...according to the site, the only method they used to "harvest" addresses was some "mailto:" links. WTO is annoyed by the mockery and is interpreting the facts to suit themselves.

Computerworld ran an article [computerworld.com] on this following WTO's party line on this issue so slavishly as to stretch anyone's definition of journalistic ethics. Most interesting is this passage:

The fake WTO site changed its look this afternoon so that it no longer exactly resembles the real WTO Web site.

Even so, the phony site contains so many references to the WTO that some search engines are directing people to it instead of to the official site. A search of AltaVista using the keyword WTO returns www.gatt.org in fifth place.

So, according to the WTO and to an incompetent journalist at Computerworld, establishing an anti-WTO site that shows up fifth in search engines is tantamount to site-jacking!!

Is this the type of reasoning that you wish to defend?

Links don't work

Hmm, the links aren't working anymore. Is it /.ed already?

Does anyone have a link to a (non-distorted) mirror?

What does this have to do with My Rights??

So a corporation wants someone to take down trademarked material. What does this have to do with anything else? It looks like it's just a dispute between 2 parties.

I know slashdot editors think everything done by corporations somehow tramples on my rights, but I just don't see the connection here.

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

The World Trade Organization is not an ordinary corporation; it's an international UN organization.

Imagine if the Red Cross wanted people to take down websites complaining about people who were infected by HIV via blood transfusions. Get it?

Re:What does this have to do with My Rights??

Well let me see
1. Its not trademarked
2. Its satire which has a special place in copyright law
3. Its political speech. The WTO are trying to censor legitimate protest at their attempts to screw the planet.

/.ed

> The site appears intact for now

Great, now it's /.ed.

MIRROR

I've managed to grab copies of the software just as their site got /.d.

Please be nice, because I'm only on cable. Grab the files here [websoup.net].

Here are mirrors:

http://yesiwill.plagiarist.org [plagiarist.org]

http://detritus/projects/yesiwill [detritus.net]

Let's see how well they survive a slashdotting.

Slashdot is

The WTO's greatest defense. No one will ever see the offending pages at this rate...

Distorted mirrors

Learn more about funhouse mirrors and how they work right here: The Science of Light [learner.org].

Think before you mod: is it really offtopic..?

beyond the golden parachute

these guys and gals, the yes men, do some seriously, seriously cool stuff. in the november issue of harper's [harpers.org], they print a transcript of a talk that these folks were invited to give at a textiles conference in Tampere, Finland, from folks that thought that they really were the WTO. A few snippets:

... How do we at the WTO fit in? Well, that's easy: We want to help you acieve those dollar results. We want to help make sure that nothing - protectionism, worry, even violence against physical property - stands in the way of your dollar results.

and some more:

... CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR: PROTECTIONISM

[Slide: Freedom]
Why did people fight and die and lose money? It comes down to one word: FREEDOM.
[Slide: Southern Happiness]
By the 1860s, the South was utterly flush with cash. It had recently benefited from the cotton gin, an invention that took the seeds out of cotton and the South out of its preindustrial past. Hundreds of thousands of workers, previously unemployed in their countries of origin, were given useful jobs in textiles. Into this rosy picture of freedom and boom stepped ... you guessed it: the NORTH.

it goes on, about how the market would have stopped slavery ("Involuntarily Imported Workforce") given time, moving production to the third world where things are cheaper, then it gets wack:

Now, we all known that not even the best workplace design can help even the most astute manage keep track odf hstaff. But our solution inables a lot more rapport with remote workers.

Mike, would you please?
[Unruh steps out from behind the podium to a drum roll. An assistant grabs him by the tie and belt and rips off his suit to reveal a golden spandex unitard underneath.]
Ah! That's better! This is the Management Leisure suit. This is the WTO's answer to the problems of maintaining rapport with distant workers and maintaining one's own mental health as a manager with the proper amount of leisure. How does the MLS work, besides being comfortable? Allow me to describe the suit's core features.
[Unruh unzips the from of the suit, then pulls on a rip cord that inflates a three-foot-long golden phallus. The audience claps.]

And it goes on.

The presentation, which Harper's describes as "well-received", was subsequently praised by the MC on three seperate occasions that day.

(I want to be a yes man :)

Lack of primary source

I would be more interested if the Yes Men provided the text of Verio's complaint. I would find the story more credible if Slashdot bothered to verify that Verio did actually complain.

As far as I can tell from this article, we have been offered absolutely no evidence that the WTO has in fact complained, using the DMCA or any other tool.

Reminds me of the Dialectizer...

It seems sort of like a bigger versioin of the Dialectizer [rinkworks.com], a site that allows you to insert a url and then have all the text on the page translated into a number of amusing "languages," such as redneck, jive, elmer fudd, etc. /. readers may especially appreciate the hacker dialect. ^_^ Try this version of slashdot! [rinkworks.com](hit the dialectize button). CmdrTaco's gone l33+!

He he he

"The site appears intact for now, but read on to learn about the interesting software the complaint has spawned -- perhaps this isn't what the WTO had in mind."

The WTO has nothing to fear... the /. effect will take care of that in short order. ;)

Roll-your-own "Parody" site here...

I like this one [pornolize.com] better!

...

Time to get web stripper out and download the whole thing before it goes poof.

SlashPorn!

Slashporn [pornolize.com]. 'nuff said.

Sample of installation; mirror

I went ahead and installed this to show my systems administration class on Monday (INLS183 [unc.edu]). If you're trying to install the software, I included steps in the sample directory at this location [unc.edu]. The installation steps I used are in parody-steps.txt.

I made a parody, visit here [unc.edu] to see (it probably won't be up too long...). Finally, you can also get the code in the directory mentioned above, if you are having trouble finding a mirror. Retrieve yesiwill-1.0.tar.gz

• Greg

Two-Timed by Slashdot

When I submitted this story, I got this...

"2001-11-15 16:39:40 WTO Tells ISP: Remove Satire Web Site (articles,news) (rejected)"

... but now it appears under another's name. All the good lovin' I gave you, Slashdot, and how you are in another's arms!

For the satire impared, let me say it's not such a big deal. A tiny deal, not a big deal.

this is very scary....

I am on gatt.org....

I'm reading the website... and now I am wondering is it defaced or it's the real thing? I mean I never really bothered with all that WTO stuff but when I read (on the front page):

>Brazilian AIDS drugs a sure path to economic sickness

>Today, however, another Holocaust is taking place: it goes by the name of "distrust of big business," and it is every bit as terrible as the last.

>Qatar saves the day Responding to the selfish and dangerous actions of special-interest forces at recent free-trade summits, the kingdom of Qatar has generously offered to host the next WTO Ministerial. In Qatar, the sort of lobbying seen in Seattle, Quebec, Davos, Prague, Barcelona, and elsewhere is strictly illegal and heavily punished, ...

I mean... what the hell?? is that all real? I mean I'm used to lying politician, backstabbing authority figures, and all that stuff, but I mean, putting such things on a front page has really shocked me, I can't beleive people can be that openly materialistic and use historic stuff and lie without raising a LOT of opposition...

Especially the last part "we don't value your opinion, saying you dislike what we are working on is illegal so we will host our "democratic" process in a place you'll get shot in the head if you disagree"... wow... now I see why people are so upset...while I don't think people fighting police to disrupt the meeting is a viable option (policemen are people like you and me, just doing what they are told to, hitting them won't make things better), I do think it's bad to not let people express their opposition, afterall, these are the people these leaders are supposed to work for, they should give numbers and sensibilization if having a world-class economy system is such a good thing, not shutting the door off and smashing opponents, this shows only that these opponents might be right somewhere...

I can't beleive it, everyone should go take a look at that site, that gatt.org thing, anyone with a minimal sense of humanity and a bit of education will probably feel like I am right now, there's some stuff that is still true there, BUT it's stuff usually classified as "silent truth", you know it's right but you don't say it openly because it could backfire heavily (like the AIDS thing for example, of course if you copy a patented thing that took years and billion in research, it's stealing, but then again, selling it to make 100 of billions in profits (I did mention PROFITS not only recovering the cost of R&D and salaries) so that rich people can afford it and poor people can't, is it a more noble goal?

Anyways, I leave you with that quote:

--
Protesters rich, study shows
A new study shows that the special-interest lobbyists attending the Seattle, Prague, Nice, Davos, and other demonstrations come from population sectors that have freedom and money to travel, putting them in a different class from those sectors of the developing world they pretend to defend.
--

Well if that system we all know is to make rich people richer, if people that are opposing it are already rich, I read this and I think "maybe there's really something wrong in there" and with everything else I just read on their website, I'm really beginning to think that there is.

Funny thing is when this happened in Quebec (where I live) I thought that these protestors were just a bunch of kids with too much hormones needing to hit at something just like a big heavy metal concert... like a big party... I'm scared now because while this might still apply to a bunch of the people that were there, now I realize that 10,000s of people can't all be wrong... scary...

Re:Or maybe it is more serious....

So what you're saying is that because a few hooligans turned up to start a riot and have some fun, none of the other protesters were there for any legitimate reason?

I hadn't heard of people comming pre-dressed for battle before (but then I don't pay much attentiont to the protests). I'm open to the possibility that there might be a group of protesters who actually think that violence will promote their cause rather than contaminate it, but anyone who isn't the police and actually turns up to a protest in ballistic protective gear, a gas mask, and a balaclava, strikes me as being there (paid even) specifically to discredit the entire protest movement as 'just a bunch of hooligans'.

here's the mike - you tell your story in your words." They wouldn't.

And neither would I, the problems with gobalisation are complex and we live in a sound bite generation. The reporter will choose the most sensational sentence - or even fraction of a sentence and air that (normally completely out of context). You know this is true. If you have no editorial control, you cannot tell your story in your own words.

I hear protesters have cottened onto how poor a job the media do and have started bring their own video cameras to protests. Good on them.

However, as much as I like the angle this parody site is presenting the WTO views from, I do have to agree with you that the WTO probably has a legitimate complaint here.

Of course the easy out is:

the parody is produced by code, in code.

Seeing as code is free speech (for the time being) it is as simple as saying the program "produces html code which is free speech, and is a parody...which is protected as free speech as well".

Yeah, that is kind of a weasle-y way of thinking, but "eagles my fly, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines", seems to apply.

Or, as one poster pointed out "Fight fire with fire".

stray thought for the day:
DMCA: Digital Masturbating Conusmers of America. ( if you ran it thru the pornalize would it accomplish anything?)

Web page translator

I remember a couple of years ago \. posted an article on how a company filed a lawsuit against the creator of an ebonics translator page and won. It took existing pages and "ebonified" them. The plantiff claimed copyright infringement when the tool was used on their particular page. Anyone remember this? It seems relevant to this new case.

What gets me is this.

He was asked to remove it in a letter, in accordance with the DMCA.

THe DMCA lets a copyright holder do this, to protect their work. They can write a letter, and have material taken down.

However... the counter to this is that the person with the site merely has to send a letter back declaring that the information does NOT infringe on their copyrights. They then have a certain number of days to file suit or drop it.

do you think most people realize it's a parody?

The direct issue with this item appears at first to be DMCA related, but in my view the root cause issue is a highly politicized agenda driven site which is trying to use ANY topic and ANY issue to score political points against global trade related organizations.

Examining the site, I would realize it is not the true WTO site, but MANY people are not as well informed. The site appears remarkably realistic, uses the WTO logos and nowhere does it say its a parody. The site is blatantly and unarguably attempting to use deception and fraudulent argument to advance its political agenda.

Imagine there was a linuxkernel.org which looked exactly like the REAL kernel.org but gave out kernels patched to provide root access on port 80. The point of trademarks is to provide authenticity to information and a product. Reading something in the New York Times conveys something about its accuracy and the source of the information.

When you have guerrilla groups attempting to use false trust to advance their agenda, not only is it cowardly, but it is against the law.

This is not a question of free speech

This is a pretty straight down the line situation: gatt.org is out of line. It is not clearly a parody, and is effectively putting words into the mouth of the body it's targetting. Look at the photographs of Mike Moore next to blocks of offensive text!

Slashdot is pretty strong on freedom of speech issues, but I think presenting this as one reflects badly on legitimate free speech issues covered in other issues.

Re:This is not a question of free speech

It is not clearly a parody, and is effectively putting words into the mouth of the body it's targetting.

Putting offensive words in people's mouth is a good definition of parody. Have you watched late night shows lately?

Besides, if the words are so offensive that you know they couldn't have been said by the WTO, then it is a clear parody. Alternatively, if you are not sure that it is the parody then either

• the words are not really so offensive
• You believe that the WTO can make such offensive comment in earnest.

In the second case this isn't just parody but world class top of-the-line fscking Jonathan Swift kind of parody.

Real Time Slashdot Parodies

I hope VA Linux doesn't make me take this down!

Check out:
Smurfdot [mrsodaoverload.com] and
Thunderslash [mrsodaoverload.com]

WTO try every way to stop GATT.org

GATT.org HAD TO copy the look and feel of site - IT IS NECESSARY FOR PARODY.

Parody: (1)A literary composition imitating the characteristic style of some other work or writer, but treating a serious subject in a nonsensical manner in an attempt at humor or ridicule.

They use the copyright EXCUSE and also try to take it on another EXCUSE - the name GATT.org 'confuses' visitors.

From article at IDG.net [idg.net].

Quote:

While the WTO encourages criticism of its role, there are limits to the forms this should take, said Carrier.

The WTO is powerless to stop the hoax until a new procedure for domain name arbitration is introduced by the World Intellectual
Property Organization allowing it to take control of the domain gatt.org, Carrier said.

End Quote.

They wish to muffle peoples voice, by taking gatt.org - saying it 'confuses' visitors to the site.

They know the solution to avoid 'consumer confusion'.

But they want this as an EXCUSE to steal peoples domains - so people can not use it.

Please visit WIPO.org.uk [wipo.org.uk] to see the simple solution the authorities have been hiding from you.

Re:Big deal...

umm, this isn't "machine" in the sense that a program actually does it. The people @ the Onion are just a group of really fucking funny people.

I honestly don't think that what this program does is all that funny, nor do I care about what happens as a result of this...

It's one thing to do a parody of a site on your own as a joke or whatever but to make a fucking program so that other people can have the almost exact same thing so that they can be annoying and put up stupid, unoriginal, web-sites? Goto any mom-pop ISP and load up someone's web page. There are plenty of sites out there that are almost identical w/a few changes that are almost funny...

"Welcome to my HOMEPAGE! -- This site is under construction"

Re:Microsoft

what? they can't do that? how?

with most users* running their software, and some anon. donations to judges/politicians... thats the reason why windows is closed - because the code to do this and change the underlaying protocals are all dorment, hidden in every version of windows that regularly net-updates. When they decide, overnight the internet will change - servers will refuse connections from non-windows machines. entire websites will automatically be 'updated' to use the new executable package technology, MSN will become the defualt dial-up connection and all other dun profiles will be deleted. Linus Torvalds will be turned to for a press conference for his views.. but wait, where is Torvalds????!! he has gone, been taken care of. (outstanding favour from the government to billy g for anon. donations). People turn to demonstrations but wait! slashdot is not working, no one can communicate: email??? gone irc??? gone. Be afraid... be very afraid

This conspiracy theory is purely fiction and in no way factual. Any resemblence to real life situations is purely coincidence. Microsoft(tm) is a registered trade mark of Capitalist Pigs corp. Any spelling mistakes in this post are the result of not giving a shit

TROLL!!!

That message above was a TROLL. Nader won the last election with 88% of the vote. The IWW has had control of the US Congress for the last 75 years. The US tax rate has topped 93% and there are mass demonistrations to increase taxes. Every time the WTO meets, there are tens of millions of protesters on the site and all commerce shuts down worldwide. It just isn't possible that anyone at all could object to the well reasoned progressive views of the anti-GATT protesters, which are held by the vast majority of all people.

incredibly hyperbolic, but not entirely off base

There are two main themes I have noticed with the anti-globalization movement.

First, they have no alternative. The entire movement is defined by what it is against, not by what it is for.

Second, large sections of the movement have no qualms with using false arguments and violence to advance their agenda.

For example, the anti-trade (supposed parody) gatt.org flatly accuses AIDS drug manufacturers of genocide. Saying that creators of drugs which cure AIDS actually are killing people afflicted with the disease is not only audacious, but logicaly incoherent. However, gatt.org does not let facts get in the way.

The anti-globalization protests have PRETENDED to be non-violent (and indeed some groups are). However, there are a large number of groups which have no qualms with blatant destruction and violence, and even more groups tolerate those groups and are thus tacitly complicit. If the movement really was non-violent, why are so many police needed to prevent full scale riots like Seattle?

And when violence does occur, members of the movement engage again in misinformation by blaming the police. Last time I checked, it wasn't the police who were looting stores and setting cars ablaze. If one actually watches the news in detail, the protestor who was shot in Genoa was killed as he was attempting to hurl a fire extinguisher at the head of a policeman. (Sounds pretty close to attempted 2nd degree murder to me.)

Members of the anti-globalization movement at the BARE MINIMUM must confront why their message and method is so attractive to violent thugs.

Re:Big deal...

I dunno, I thought their little side note (with picture) that: "Jenna Bush's federally protected wetlands now open for public drilling." was pretty fucking funny myself. I'd like to see a machine come up with THAT.