Carnegie Mellon student threatened by Wal-Mart lawyers over Class Project

Lawyers representing Wal-Mart have used a cease and desist order (PDF of it) to force a website ran by a Carnegie Mellon University student offline. The website, created by Daniel Papasian, parodied The Wal-Mart Foundation, a subsidiary of Wal-Mart that promotes community development.

The website was a project for a class called "Parasitic Media" that encourages students to participate in political criticism through the tactical use of satire in the media. Other projects created in the class include 700-club, which announces the online sale of indulgences for Catholics.
"The site was a form of 'identity correction,' in which I used a parody to highlight real problems with companies like Wal-Mart. My site was designed to get people thinking about the consequences of importing goods from countries with poor labor laws, the environmental effects of big-box stores, and whether Wal-Mart is as benign as some would like us to believe," the student said.
Papasian plans on documenting his experience and making it available on his site, walmart-foundation.
More in the Press Release (PDF).

From the web site:
Philosophy
Wal-Mart's Good.Works. community involvement program is based on the philosophy of Corporate Social Responsibility. By running this page, we get to avert any criticism of anything bad we do by highlighting the good works that we do in our community. This keeps people distracted, so they don't bother checking into what we and other big multinationals are doing. In our experience, we can silence dissent by convincing the masses that our interests and their interests intersect.