[aha] Face to Facebook legal and media update - Press Release

[Paolo Cirio]

Press Release, April 7th, 2011. Belgrade.

Face to Facebook
http://www.face-to-facebook.net
A project by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico.

Legal update:
After sending us a "cease and desist letter" (which led to making the  
website Lovely-Faces.com unavailable), asking us to give them back the  
1M publicly available data and terminating our Facebook personal  
accounts, Facebook lawyers are continuing to follow up with us. First  
they are insisting on asking us to remove all the content from the  
Face-to-Facebook.net domain, which is the website documenting the  
project. This request sounds quite surreal for us: this website merely  
contains a collection of texts, materials and links related to Face-to- 
Facebook project. Even more, we have received a threat from Facebook  
legal department about the claim that the face-to-facebook.net domain  
name is violating Facebook trademark.
So, why should such a big online corporation push a couple of artists  
to remove the documentation of their project? Our lawyers are  
investigating the legal basis of their request.

Global Mass Media Hack Performance:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/press-coverage.php
Meanwhile, the news went through to more than 1000 media reports,  
reaching a wide audience spread all over the globe. Very different  
stages were involved like: tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, blogs,  
portals and plenty of personal blogs, not counting the thousands of  
tweets. The pattern of propagation would need time to be properly  
analyzed, but it definitively is "viral", especially in some countries  
like Brazil, Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, Ukraine.
There are plenty of captivating scenes in this mass media performance,  
like for example the one where 93 per cent of the 7538 participants to  
the online poll opened by the Australian newspaper The Age answered  
"Yes" to the question "Should Lovely-faces.com require consent to use  
your photo?" Maybe that influenced also the blog "Ethics Alarms" to  
declare Lovely-Faces.com as "Unethical Website of the Month." And the  
controversial aspect of the project has been clearly picked up even by  
some popular U.S. TV news (see links below) sometimes resulting as  
quite bizarre.

Some selected TV News videos:
* MyFox LA, Los Angeles Fox News Tv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJYRM9VAtsE
* WSBTV, Atlanta WSB-TV channel 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye3Qyz-ojvI
* Newsy, Online video news analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlDs3PdGKSA
* Apple daily HK, Taiwan, China, Hong-Kong-based newspaper
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STSNZqoqk24
* Tagesschau, German public TV ARD channel 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzCh1XPWlMY

Some selected online Interviews:
* CNN, US - Art 'hacktivists' take on Facebook:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/11/artists.facebook.project
* 2010LAB (Video), Germany - Facebook and Transmediale - your face is  
ours:
http://www.2010lab.tv/en/video/facebook-and-transmediale-your-face-ours
* Artinfo.com, US - The Artist Who's Out to Liberate Facebook:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36912/the-artist-whos-out-to-liberate-facebook-a-qa-with-profile-thief-paolo-cirio
* Artline, Switzerland - Sculptors of data  - Die Daten-Bildhauer
http://www.artline.org/?p=detail&id=10736&back=home&L=0
* Jetzt, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany - Feldzug gegen Facebook:
http://jetzt.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/519492/Feldzug-gegen-Facebook
* Politika, Serbia, newspaper
http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/spektar/zivot-i-stil/Uzeli-smo-desetine-hiljada-profila-iz-Srbije.sr.html
* Ha'aretz, Israel, newspaper
http://www.haaretz.co.il/captain/spages/1217717.html

Exhibitions and presentations of Face to Facebook during April:
* Share Conferences, presentation , Belgrade - Serbia
* ENTER Festival, exhibition & presentation, Prague - Czech Republic
* Chilling Effects, exhibition & presentation at TETEM, Enschede - The  
Netherlands
* REALITYFLOWHACKED, exhibition, Paolo Cirio's solo show at Aksioma |  
Project Space, Ljubljana - Slovenja
* EMAF 2011, presentation, Osnabrück - Germany


Paolo and Alessandro.