from the collateral-prank-damage dept
Famous politico-pranksters The Yes Men have a long history of putting forth convincing parody websites that get those they parody to rush around to get the websites offline. Back in 2007, there was the
fake ExxonMobil site that got pulled. Earlier this year it was the fake
Chamber of Commerce site that the real Chamber issued a DMCA takedown over. The latest prank is based up in Canada, with the Yes Men setting up some parody sites of Canadian government organizations, promising massive greenhouse emissions reductions. This greatly upset the Canadian government who ordered the websites' service provider to pull them down. However, as
Michael Geist points out, in the rush to pull down the sites, the ISP
also took down 4,500 other websites. Seems like quite a bit of unnecessary collateral damage. Of course, this is exactly what the Yes Men want. For every takedown, they get another burst of publicity.
Filed Under: canada, innocents, parody, takedown, yes men
