Earlier this week, Xeni blogged about Daniel Lyons's hysterical, badly researched, badly argued Forbes article in which he compared bloggers to a lynch mob and suggests sending spurious copyright complaints to ISPs to have your critics censored.
Now Kurt Opsahl, an EFF attorney who worked on the amazing bloggers' rights document, has posted a bang-on parody, in which the pamphleteers of the American revolution are substituted for bloggers:
Printing presses are the prized platform of a public lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Ben Franklin and John Hancock.
Take the tea tax. Revenue was coming, providing much needed funding to help with his Majesty's benevolent aims in the colonies.
Then the pamphleteers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched a broadsheet long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles with his printing press calling your King "deceitful,""unethical,""incredibly stupid" and "a pathological liar" who had misled the colonists. The author claimed to be "Silence Dogood," a middle-aged widow who started a one-woman "watchdog" pamphlet, to expose alleged regal excess.
Soon your King was fielding correspondence from alarmed subjects and assuring them he hadn't been unethical. Eerily similar allegations began popping up in anonymous posts in the New England Courant, but the Courant refused His Majesty's demand to identify the attackers. "The lawyer for the Courant basically told me, 'Ha-ha-ha, you're screwed,'" the King's counselor says. Meanwhile, his tormentor sent letters about his Majesty to France, Prussia, Spain and the New York Stock Exchange.
(Thanks, Kurt!)
