Wal-Mart Targets Student
| By mmrowka - Apr 29th, 2005 at 11:04 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
The AP reports that Wal-Mart recently forced a 20 year-old Carnegie Mellon student, Daniel Papasian, of West Hartford, Connecticut to shut down his parody of the Wal-Mart Foundation web site. The reason? Wal-Mart claims Papasian violated copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by improperly using images from the real Wal-Mart Foundation's Web site.
The site was created for a class and was meant to be a parody. Papasian acknowledged using Wal-Mart's graphics on his web site but said he believed he could use the images as part of a parody.
Papasian makes his case in a recent blog posting on the United Food and Commercial Worker’s Wake-up Wal-Mart site.
I targeted the Foundation's website because I thought that it was appropriate to challenge the idea that Wal-Mart is a big benevolent corporation. They do serious damage wherever they go, and when they work to undo a very small portion of it, they pretend its charity and we should be grateful to them. I think that idea really insults our intelligence, so I made a parody site that was more honest about the way Wal-Mart operates.
Wal-Mart has tried to shut me down, and the result has been a lot of attention to the case and the site. My hope for the future is that a lot of this attention can get focused on Wal-Mart and the things that Wal-Mart and other large corporations do to the communities they operate in. My site took a couple days of work to launch. The real effort is still to come- and it'll start by convincing people that Wal-Mart is dangerous to communities and working people everywhere.
The site was taken down briefly to be modified and was recently put back up with the word “censored” over images Wal-Mart targeted. In a release, Papasian says he will document all of his experiences with the big box retailer on his site.
Related: Check out Wake-up Wal-Mart’s Mothers Day Campaign, Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart.
The site was created for a class and was meant to be a parody. Papasian acknowledged using Wal-Mart's graphics on his web site but said he believed he could use the images as part of a parody.
Papasian makes his case in a recent blog posting on the United Food and Commercial Worker’s Wake-up Wal-Mart site.
I targeted the Foundation's website because I thought that it was appropriate to challenge the idea that Wal-Mart is a big benevolent corporation. They do serious damage wherever they go, and when they work to undo a very small portion of it, they pretend its charity and we should be grateful to them. I think that idea really insults our intelligence, so I made a parody site that was more honest about the way Wal-Mart operates.
Wal-Mart has tried to shut me down, and the result has been a lot of attention to the case and the site. My hope for the future is that a lot of this attention can get focused on Wal-Mart and the things that Wal-Mart and other large corporations do to the communities they operate in. My site took a couple days of work to launch. The real effort is still to come- and it'll start by convincing people that Wal-Mart is dangerous to communities and working people everywhere.
The site was taken down briefly to be modified and was recently put back up with the word “censored” over images Wal-Mart targeted. In a release, Papasian says he will document all of his experiences with the big box retailer on his site.
Related: Check out Wake-up Wal-Mart’s Mothers Day Campaign, Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart.
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