Saw this Slashdot post. A student at CMU made a website parodying the Wal-Mart Foundation (a thinly veiled attempt to improve the parent corp’s public image through small scattered donations) for a class on “Parasitic Media”. Guess Wal-Mart didn’t take too kindly to how they were portrayed, so they whipped out that horrendous piece of legeslation, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA’s a vague wording allows large corporations with lots of cash to easily threaten things they don’t like. Sounds a bit like the RIAA going after Diamond Multimedia when they first released the RIO portable MP3 player (first MP3 player backed by a major corporation). I wrote a brief bit about it back when I was an undergrad taking a course on ethics in engineering (surprisingly enough, it’s still available here on the course website).
Wonder if the Feds will go after mypyramid.org (a spoof Jeff pointed out yesterday parodying the FDA’s revamp of the food pyramid at mypyramid.gov)
Wish the course had a website documenting student projects. There have been all sorts of cool ones in the past, like giant spiders.
I’m such a softie. I don’t know how parents manage to drop their kids off at school for the first time.