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âKony 2012′ Threatens Lawsuit Against Online Parody
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 Childrenâs style. They wanted to take Invisible Childrenâs 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 ânew activism that puts the reader, the donor, the viewer at the center of the story.â
Invisible Children doesnât think Kickstriker is funny. In fact, theyâve sent the Kickstriker team a cease-and-desist warning to take down the parody page.
âIt has come to our attention that you are causing public confusion through your use of Invisible Childrenâs copyrighted and trademarked property on www.kickstriker.com. This impermissible use is a blatant and egregious infringement of Invisible Childrenâs valuable copyright and trademark rights,â reads a letter Invisible Children sent last week and acquired by Danger Room. â[F]ailure to cease and desist your unlawful use of Invisible Childrenâs intellectual property will result in legal action.â
Among Invisible Childrenâs demands: âConfirm in writing that you have permanently deleted all electronic copies of the unauthorized and infringing materials from any computers, servers, or other distribution mediaâ; take down any links to Invisible Childrenâs material; and declare âin a prominent locationâ that Kickstriker is âin no way associated with Invisible Children, Inc. or the Kony 2012 campaign.â
All of which has Kickstrikerâs founders rolling their eyes.
âThe purpose of our website, Kickstriker.com (henceforth âKickstrikerâ), is to critique a number of institutions, including Invisible Children, through the use of political satire,â Kickstrikerâs Mehan Jayasuriya, James Borda and Josh Begley reply in a Monday letter. âAs such, while Kickstriker makes use of the trademarked terms âInvisible Childrenâ and âKONY 2012,â these uses are protected under the doctrine of fair use, which allows for such uses for the purposes of criticism and commentary.â
Invisible Children succeeded in provoking a debate â not just about Joseph Kony and central Africaâs wars, but about its own methods. Writer Teju Cole famously called Kony 2012 a symptom of the âWhite Savior Industrial Complex.â Others have derided it for misunderstanding basic facts about Ugandaâs conflict. Less seriously, Kony 2012 can get reduced to its meme-dom: some pranksters replaced Kony with âKanye,â for instance.
Kickstriker is just the latest in that line of criticism. And no, theyâre not shutting down the site: after all, itâs 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. âWe will certainly continue to do whatever it takes to keep the site online,â Jayasuriya tells Danger Room.
Jayasuriya said he and his friends werenât ânecessarily shockedâ to receive a cease and desist demand. âI donât think any of us guessed that of all the organizations that we skewered, Invisible Children would be the one to take action.â In other words, Invisible Children proved more sensitive to criticism â and litigious â 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, itâs kind of tapped out. âIt was designed to be a one-off, self-contained sort of thing,â Jayasuriya says. Although it got media attention, âwe 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.â
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