The producers of a viral phenomenon urging the capture of a Ugandan warlord want you to know they will not be mocked.
After the activist group Invisible Children created the Kony 2012 campaign to arrest Joseph Kony, a group of New York University graduate students created Kickstriker, a parody of a Kickstarter page aping Invisible Children's style. They wanted to take Invisible Children's earnestness to the point of absurdity, through a (fake) appeal to crowdsource the financing of mercenaries to hunt Kony down. They critiqued what one of them described to Danger Room as a 'new activism that puts the reader, the donor, the viewer at the center of the story.'
Invisible Children doesn't think Kickstriker is funny. In fact, they've sent the Kickstriker team a cease-and-desist warning to take down the parody page.
'It has come to our attention that you are causing public confusion through your use of Invisible Children's copyrighted and trademarked property on www.kickstriker.com. This impermissible use is a blatant and egregious infringement of Invisible Children's valuable copyright and trademark rights,' reads a letter Invisible Children sent last week and acquired by Danger Room. '[F]ailure to cease and desist your unlawful use of Invisible Children's intellectual property will result in legal action.'
Among Invisible Children's demands: 'Confirm in writing that you have permanently deleted all electronic copies of the unauthorized and infringing materials from any computers, servers, or other distribution media'; take down any links to Invisible Children's material; and declare 'in a prominent location' that Kickstriker is 'in no way associated with Invisible Children, Inc. or the Kony 2012 campaign.'
All of which has Kickstriker's founders rolling their eyes.
'The purpose of our website, Kickstriker.com (henceforth 'Kickstriker'), is to critique a number of institutions, including Invisible Children, through the use of political satire,' Kickstriker's Mehan Jayasuriya, James Borda and Josh Begley reply in a Monday letter. 'As such, while Kickstriker makes use of the trademarked terms 'Invisible Children' and 'KONY 2012,' these uses are protected under the doctrine of fair use, which allows for such uses for the purposes of criticism and commentary.'
Invisible Children succeeded in provoking a debate ' not just about Joseph Kony and central Africa's wars, but about its own methods. Writer Teju Cole famously called Kony 2012 a symptom of the 'White Savior Industrial Complex.' Others have derided it for misunderstanding basic facts about Uganda's conflict. Less seriously, Kony 2012 can get reduced to its meme-dom: some pranksters replaced Kony with 'Kanye,' for instance.
Kickstriker is just the latest in that line of criticism. And no, they're not shutting down the site: after all, it's impossible to actually donate money to Kickstriker, since gullible would-be donors are alerted to the parody when they try to click through to the donation tool. 'We will certainly continue to do whatever it takes to keep the site online,' Jayasuriya tells Danger Room.
Jayasuriya said he and his friends weren't 'necessarily shocked' to receive a cease and desist demand. 'I don't think any of us guessed that of all the organizations that we skewered, Invisible Children would be the one to take action.' In other words, Invisible Children proved more sensitive to criticism ' and litigious ' than the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that Kickstriker basically called torturers.
Even though Kickstriker plans to contest any actual legal action Invisible Children may bring, as a parody, it's kind of tapped out. 'It was designed to be a one-off, self-contained sort of thing,' Jayasuriya says. Although it got media attention, 'we had all hoped that the site would kick off a conversation about the ethics of crowdsourcing, privatized warfare and clicktivism and that still has yet to happen.'
Hmm, kind of like Kony 2012, you might say.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar