NEWSgrist: *THING

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.net´s 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

============================

*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://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://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/email.htm).

Within hours, the real Dow sent a legal threat to Dow-Chemical.com´s
upstream provider, Verio, prompting Verio to shut down the fake Dow´s
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://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://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://theyesmen.org/dow/#links), and
sympathetic activists responded by cloning and mirroring the site at
many locations, including http://www.dowethics.com/,
http://www.dowindia.com/ and, with a twist,
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://www.bursonmarsteller.com/, which recounted how the PR
giant helped to downplay the Bhopal disaster. Burson-Marsteller´s suit
against Hardwin will be heard next week by the World Intellectual
Property Organization (http://reamweaver.com/bmwipo/wipo.html).

Hardwin, unable to afford a lawyer, has composed a dryly humorous
57-page rebuttal to the PR giant´s lawsuit
(http://www.reamweaver.com/bmwipo/response.htm#reality). On page 7,
for instance, the student notes that Burson-Marsteller´s "stated goal
is ´to ensure that the perceptions which surround our clients and
influence their stakeholders are consistent with reality.´" Hardwin
goes on to assert that his satirical domain is doing precisely that,
by publicizing "academic and journalistic materials about
Burson-Marsteller´s involvement with and relationship to, for example,
Philip Morris and the National Smoker´s 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 suit´s 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 ´the Devil.´"

The primary goal of RTMark (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://rtmark.com/othersites.html#fpo), political
figures (http://www.rtmark.com/bush.html), and entities like the World
Trade Organization (http://www.gatt.org) and the World Economic Forum
(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://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

http://www.thing.net/~rdom/

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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