From The Phone Line

Hecklers Will be Punished
Pleiades called me to let me know of this one.
It appears Richard Neville set up a satire webpage of John Howard PM of Australia, which quickly turned into this fiasco. Neville has been a sort of professional heckler of sorts so maybe this is a sign thaat he's still in the big leagues o Australian cultural discourse. he should take it as a compliment.

THE MISSING LINKS

Owing to numerous complaints of “dead links” in our .pdf copy of John Howard’s disappeared speech, Reflections on the Situation in Iraq, these links have been re-activated below. Also included are new links which support the PM’s re-appraisal of the invasion’s aftermath. A link to the text version of the speech, with some background on its removal, is available.
STORM IN TEACUP

The domain name, johnhowardpm.org, is hosted by Melbourne IT. In less than 36 hours of its launch, following 10,500 visits to the site, the plug was pulled. By who? On what grounds? It took three days for Melb IT to make contact with me and help lift the veils of confusion. After receiving a phone call from Greg Williams of the People, Resources & Communications Division at the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet, Melb IT put the domain name on HOLD, where it remains. This domain cannot be transferred to another, more resilient host, for 60 days. In addition to the complaint from John Howard’s office, Melbourne IT said they had received calls from THREE Federal Police, and provided the name of an agent from the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. As far as I know, my passport has not met the same fate as my
domain name.
So, what is the crime?

The nasty tech term is “phishing”, pronounced “fishing”. A comment on whether this applies to jonhnhowardpm.org comes from one of hundreds of emailers: “For Melbourne IT to consider this a phishing site is ludicrous - phishing has to involve you deliberately trying to con people into giving up some sort of valuable personal information, not just stealing Johnny's traffic from Google. Phishing goes to identity theft, credit card fraud etc. and has nothing to do with satire - it is necessarily criminal in nature! Emulation is not in and of itself enough to constitute phishing.

There is a process that has to be followed if their is any contention over the intellectual property inherent in a domain name. You're entitled to be notified and to argue your case. Melbourne IT is bound to follow this process, and I suggest that you complain to ICANN. I think it's also pretty well established that you can't claim copyright in a person's name.
Furthermore if there's any debate over the actual content of the site being hosted and the intellectual property contained therein, that's a civil matter - a copyright matter - and has to be taken up through the courts. In other words the Attorney General would have had to send you a nice letter asking you to "cease and desist" because you had infringed a copyright vested in the Commonwealth”. Thanks for that.
I freely admit that johnhoawrdpm.org looked similar to the previously unknown site that hosts the speeches of the PM, and that this similarity was intentional. My purpose was to make the noble sentiments emanating from the mind of a troubled John Howard seem convincing, if only for a few hours. Without this visual reinforcement, the notion that our PM was being honestly self reflective about the human costs of invading to Iraq , and that he "was looking into his heart", even expressing doubts, etc, would have been dismissed.
An enormous number of people believed the mock speech to be true, - and were thrilled, they report - and many more wanted to believe it. On a second reading, however, or with a bit of playing around, it is obvious that johnhowardpm.org operated in a satirical zone. Would the real John Howard have linked to anti war sites? Or admitted that this claims about “improved infrastructure” were bogus? Or criticised the US treatment of prisoners, the killing of journalists, the bombing of hospitals?
Yes, johnhowardpm is similar to the PM’s site, just as The Chaser's ABC TV series CNNN, captured the tone and design of the real network. Would the site have been left standing if it was less like John’s Howard’s lonely, grey, un-noticed original? We’ll never know. Any first time visitor to the US parody site, http://www.whitehouse.org/ , would be alarmingly misled, although http://www.whitehouse.gov had yet to send in the Feds. You be the judge.

So much for John Howard's promise that comedians won't get targeted by anti-sedition laws.
I promised to stay out of politics this year, but you know, the bastards keep pushing. As the folks said in the '60s, "What a drag".