1: Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay

We’re doing a round up of the best copyright-related April Fool’s jokes from the Web yesterday and today’s first link comes to us directly from the Bittorrent superstars, The Pirate Bay. Yesterday they announced, jokingly that movie studio and record company Warner Brothers had bought them out, letting The Pirate Bay “Benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners.”

Obviously, this was a joke, funny considering the role Warner Brothers played in The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden.

2: Weird Al Wiki

Taking a page from my list of potential jokes from last year, as well as many other sites before that, a popular Weird Al wiki posted a fake takedown page saying, “Hey guys, bad news, weird al’s [sic] record company sued us for publishing this information without Al’s permission. It looks like this wiki will be gone for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Strangely, the joke page is still up though we are well into April 2nd, but other pages on the site are unaffected by the fake takedown.

3: Comcast acquires BitTorrent for $53bn

Finally today, The Register played a copyright-related prank of its own claiming that U.S. ISP Comcast had purchased bittorrent for 53 billion dollars and had shut it down. The Register claimed that, “Last week, the big-name American ISP told the world it would find a way of managing its cable network without discriminating against BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic. But the fix has come much sooner than expected.”

In the article, Comcast went on to say that purchasing Bittorrent was “Their cheapest alternative” and hinted that the company plans to “purchase Apple and IBM, with an eye on destroying both iChat and Lotus Notes.”

There was also a very humorous discussion about literally poisoning Bittorrent users at the end of the article.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

People who know me know that I love April Fool’s day. However, it has always come with a conflict of interest for me on this site. Though every year I think of April Fool’s Day gags for PT, I also think of reasons not to go for it.

To date, no articles or information on the site has been knowingly and intentionally wrong. Any and all mistakes were exactly that, mistakes.

Still, PT does bring out the creativity in me. So rather than actually play any of the jokes, I’m going to list some of the stronger ideas I’ve had and why I haven’t done them.

Like all ideas, consider these non-copyrighted, feel free to steal them for next year.

The Rickroll

The Gag: Simple enough, write an article about Rick Astley and/or his record label demanding removal of the famous video (Yes, that link is a Rickroll, you have been warned) from YouTube. Then link to it repeatedly in the article and then post a notice at the end of the day that the story was a joke.

Where it Came From: Rickrolling has hit the copyright world hard. It was time to get some people back.

Why I Didn’t Do It: Fear for my life was the main reason. However, equally importantly, Reddit beat me to it earlier this year.

The RIAA Shill

The Gag: Announce that the site was sponsored by the RIAA and proceed to spend the day writing very pro-RIAA articles. Change theme to include several RIAA ads and slather the site with their logo and information.

Where it Came From: I had come up with a similar joke years ago where my then-literature site would be sponsored by Hot Topic or some other clothing store.

Why I Didn’t Do It: First, I didn’t think it was believable enough. On the other hand, the RIAA might not see the humor and come after me for trademark infringement. It’s all fun and games until someone gets a cease and desist.

The Takedown

The Gag: Replace the home page of Plagiarism Today with a notice that the site had been shut down following a DMCA notice. Then have hidden link to enter regular site.

Where it Came From: My interactions with other hosts and how they often handle copyright issues.

Why I DIdn’t Do It: I didn’t want Media Temple to get bombarded with hate mail over the issue since I’ve openly talked about where I am hosted. Also didn’t want to hurt my search engine ranking.

The Trademark Dispute

The Gag: Claim that PlagiarismToday is being forced to drop the “PT” logo due to a conflict with the PT Cruiser brand. Draft phony legal-like letters and change the logo for a day.

Where it Came From: My wife loves PT Cruisers so it seemed like a natural joke given the confusion in the house.

Why I Didn’t Do It: Besides the potential legal issues, as I just said, my wife loves PT Cruisers. I can not promise where I’d sleep if I had done it.

The Lawsuit

The Gag: Draft a phony lawsuit from a fake person and “sue” myself by posting it on the site. Link to the other person’s blog, which I would have created, and pretend that there is an ongoing dispute.

Where it Came From: This one was initially proposed by one of my many lawyer friends who was going to help me draft the fake lawsuit.

Why I Didn’t Do It: Too believable, at least to people who do not know me. Also, it would have been a lot of work, setting up and writing for a second blog just for a one-day joke.

Conclusions

Every year on this day I have a lot of fun watching the different jokes that are played and even being caught by a few of them. It’s a fun day filled with a lot of laughs.

Maybe some day I’ll think of a joke that is right for this site but, in the meantime, I more than enjoy partaking from the sidelines.

So, thank you very much for bearing with me as I take a day to recover, get caught up and answer all of my email.

I hope you found this list at least somewhat amusing and I’d love to hear your ideas for jokes too. Perhaps you can think of something I can use next year…

A Quick Word About WordCamp

I had a great time at WordCamp Dallas. You can already find photos of me and my talk as well as a video of my talk that was recorded live.

However, the live video had some audio troubles and I’m not going to post it here. Instead, I’m going to wait for the professional version that was recorded by John P and post it later this week.

Still, I do want to thank my old friends including Charles Stricklin, Lorelle VanFossen and Liz Strauss for making the event so much fun.

Also, thanks to my new friends and people I met including Spamboy, DB, and Chris Jean among many, many others.

It was a great time all around and I’m looking forward to next year!

More to come.