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You may have missed it last month when Kickstriker.com, a darkly humorous, militarized play on Kickstarter, quietly rolled out. Wired's Spencer Ackerman, one of the few who picked up on the site early on, called it a "wartime version" of the popular crowdfunding site, "where random people can bankroll new weapons and new paramilitary missions."
One campaign, nominally by Invisible Children, the organization behind Kony 2012, asks you to pledge some cash to "Bring Joseph Kony to Justice" – by hiring private mercenaries. Or, if drone warfare is more your speed, you can donate to the DIY Drone Labs project instead, which aims to "engineer a new kind of explosive that's capable of performing strikes with surgical accuracy," among other details.
Built by three graduate students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), Josh Begley, Mehan Jayasuriya and James Borda (full disclosure: I was in class at ITP with all three, though I have no association with this project), the site is pretty obviously a hoax – as evidenced by the over-the-top rhetoric used in campaigns, combined with the "Kickstriker is a hoax" disclaimer that pops up when you try to pledge.
Kickstriker was conceived amid the Kony 2012 hype and, as Jayasuriya told Wired, was meant as a commentary on "the new activism that puts the reader, the donor, the viewer at the center of the story".
But though this spoof site seemed to have slipped into the backwaters of the internet since it's early May launch, yesterday it came back with a bang.
As reported by Ackerman, Invisible Children seem to have belatedly stumbled onto Kickstriker and have now sent the site a cease-and-desist order, accusing them of copyright and trademark infringement. The letter, which threatens legal action, asks Kickstriker's owners to delete "infringing materials … from any computers, servers or other distribution media" and make clear that the site is in no way actually associated with Invisible Children – in case anyone is confused.
The site clearly informs visitors that it's a hoax when you click the 'back this project' button. Photograph: Kickstriker.com
Begley, Jayasuriya and Borda say they're not surprised by the letter, but they're also not swayed. In a response to the letter they state that use of the terms "Invisible Children" and "Kony 2012" on their site are protected by fair use standards.
"We were quite sure from the beginning that, as a parody, our site falls under the doctrine of fair use and that a copyright lawsuit would be pretty unlikely," Borda told the Guardian in an email, adding that the trio have no intention of deleting anything.
For now, it seems all Invisible Children have managed to do is drive more people to the offending website.
"The C&D and our response have driven a new spike in traffic to Kickstriker," Borda wrote. "A third of our total traffic came in one day, yesterday."
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