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[Carrie McLaren <stay.free AT verizon.net>]

NIKE SUES ARTISTS OVER SATIRE

Wish I Thought of it Department: the European art group 
0100101110101101.ORG has created a fake Nike website, Nike Ground 
(http://www.nikeground.com), portraying the company as real-estate 
vultures who buy streets and squares in cities around the world in 
order to rename them and install giant monuments of the swoosh. The 
site looks and feels so much like a Nike site that even the savviest 
web surfers should be forgiven for missing the point. But if 
ambiguity makes for a muddy message, it also insures that Nike will 
take note, and indeed -- Phil Knight et al. have issued a 30-page 
injunction demanding the immediate removal of material related to 
copyrighted material.

Here's hoping that Nike Ground gets a ton of publicity for this and 
spurs much-needed discussions about the corporate takeover of public 
space.



"ARE YOU READY FOR SOME UNSWOOSHING?"

Adbusters is going to start selling its own line of sneakers, and you 
can read the Salon article--and several hostile letters to the 
editor--here:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/08/blackspot/index.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/letters/2003/10/13/adbusters/index.html

Personally, I'm all for sellilng clothes that aren't made with slave 
labor. The idea that this is somehow "unbranding," however, doesn't 
make any sense.



ELECTRONIC VOTING = SERIOUSLY FUCKED

"A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's 
over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, 
unscrutinized control of a few large--and 
pro-Republican--corporations."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm

Mandatory reading, whatever your politics. If you think Florida's 
voting machines are a mess, you haven't seen nothing: the new 
electronic voting systems are riddled with flaws -- and owned by 
Republicans who want to keep source code and voter data secret 
("proprietary information").

This is the best article I've seen on this issue in months. 
Naturally, it comes from outside the U.S.