Tuesday, March 06, 2007



Corporate bullying. Brought to you by mining

Hot on the heels of Solid Energy's corporate bullying of the Save Happy Valley Campaign comes this story from Australia. The NSW Minerals Council, a coal lobby group, is running an expensive ad campaign on the theme of "Life. Brought to you by Mining". This crude attempt at greenwashing ("A cleaner future. Brought to you by Mining"?) lends itself to obvious parody - and so Rising Tide Australia did their own website with their own ads highlighting the environmental cost of coal:

The coal lobby couldn't tolerate this subversion of their message, and so they had the website closed down on the grounds that it "infringes copyright". However, Australian copyright law has explicit protection for parody and satire as "fair dealing". But I guess the coal industry considers themselves above that, just as they consider themselves above criticism.

Update: The website is back up here.

2 comments:

Huh. So it looks like Clarkson was right.

Posted by Duncan Bayne : 3/07/2007 06:04:00 PM

FYI, I think the companies in question were wrong to attempt to prevent the parody of their advertising.

But the anti-mining protesters, well ... they're a whole order of magnitude more wrong.

Posted by Duncan Bayne : 3/07/2007 06:05:00 PM