Some of you may recall the plagiarist.org "Plagiarist Acquisitions"
page, an art piece which spoofed corporate takeovers by pretending that
plagiarist.org had taken over twenty-seven of the world's largest
corporations. Plagiarist.org is a web-based art project dealing in a
tongue-in-cheek manner with issues such as proprietorship,
appropriation, the infinite recursiveness of the web, and the
massiveness of corporations.
FYI, see http://plagiarist.org/acquisitions.html
For the short story of Dupont's "cease-and-desist or we'll sue" order
against plagiarist.org, which they presented on June 14th to my
employer, CalArts, a private arts college. (CalArts is not mentioned on
the site, which is a personal art project; however, Dupont picked up my
address at work from Internic records.) Dupont has also indicated to
CalArts that they had been working with several other large corporations
on this issue; server access logs show that plagiarist.org and
what-was-the-Acquisitions-page indeed have become quite popular with its
former corporate listees as well as with intellectual property law
firms. (To help plagiarist's new visitors wile away the hours looking at
the site, I've included a new feature at http://plagiarist.org -
"Corporate Lawyers' Cat and Mouse Game.")
Among the material Dupont found "regarding" plagiarist.org, which they
submitted to CalArts, was a reference from an entirely unrelated website
to an apparent death threat made by some unrelated person addressed as
"plagiarist" against the public relations director of the Jewish Defense
League, and my inclusion of the following text in the .plan of an
unrelated-to-plagiarist.org, personal e-mail account:
+ + +
Uplifting quote:
"I've killed more people than the Unabomber has because I've paid more
in taxes than he has."–Excene Cervenka
+ + +
Apparently Dupont may not have found that uplifting…. They also sent
along printouts of twelve pages of the never-ending "Plagiarist
Manifesto" (http://plagiarist.org/manifeste/manifesto.pl) I'm not sure
why….
Anyway, it seems the Dupont lawyers also may not have been uplifted by
my response page now at http://plagiarist.org/acquisitions.html which
documents the situation, because on June 22nd they sent another fax to
CalArts requesting that this page be removed. No word yet on why Dupont
sent that one or whether I will in fact have to remove it.
So if you're interested, take a look at it while you can….
