Left to chance

U.S. Chamber Wants Fake Press Release Removed From Internet

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is demanding an internet provider take down a spoofed press release set up by the culture jamming collective the Yes Men, which falsely announced the Chamber now supports legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On Monday, a wide variety of mainstream news outlets picked up the hoax announcement, which was followed by a staged press conference at the National Press Club featuring a Yes Men member posing as a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce. The press conference was interrupted when an actual Chamber spokesman burst into the room and confronted his tree hugging doppelganger.

Though the Yes Men have come clean on the hoax, the Chamber of Commerce is evidently unhappy that the fake press release is still out there, sitting on a website modeled on the Chamber’s actual site. Citing copyright claims, the chamber is demanding ISP Hurricane Electric of Fremont, California, remove the page.

“The website infringes the Chamber of Commerce’s copyrights by directly copying the images, logos, design, and layout of the Chamber of Commerce’s copyright-protected official website,” the takedown notice (.pdf) to Hurricane reads.

The Tuesday notice cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires internet service providers remove unauthorized copyrighted material at an owner’s request, or risk the same civil liability as the person who posted it.

But the nation’s top business lobby is going too far, and is abusing the DMCA takedown provisions, according to (.pdf) the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the Yes Men in the copyright dispute. On Thursday, EFF lawyer Matt Zimmerman fired back a response to the Chamber saying the pranksters would not be taking down the page.

“It’s hard to argue that this is not for purposes of commentary and criticism, which are protected,” Zimmerman said in a telephone interview.

Upon a close read of the online press release, which is not really by Chamber president Thomas J. Donohue, it’s easy to conclude that it’s a fake, a hoax or a parody protected by copyright law. It does not matter that Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNBC and others reported the fake news as real on Monday. The first question under a fair-use analysis under copyright law is: what is the nature and purpose of the work at issue.

The Chamber might have better luck with a trademark claim, since the prank site has clearly resulted in confusion – a key factor in trademark disputes. But a trademark lawsuit could take years to settle, and does not require the prompt removal of the content in question.

“If they want to make a future argument in a lawsuit about some other interest they may have, we’ll deal with that at that point,” Zimmerman said

Neither Hurricane nor the chamber’s attorneys returned calls for comment. The press release was still online as of Friday afternoon.

Past Yes Men pranks include distributing thousands of fake New York Times editions incorrectly announcing the end of the Iraq war last year.

Jacques Servin, a member of the group, said in a telephone interview that the bogus Chamber of Commerce news release was protected commentary.

“The Chamber,” he said, “has proven itself to prefer the freedom of large corporations to do whatever they want over the freedom of all of us to survive.”

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Original article at Threat Level