John Naughton
Here is a story to make megacorp executives choke on their muesli: eToys.com, a huge online retailer of toys based in California, has been humiliated by a civil disobedience campaign orchestrated by a community of Internet activists.
Late last year, eToys made the mistake of suing a group of Swiss multimedia artists and pranksters who run www.etoy.com, which is a byword on the Net for devising ingenious ways to pull corporate tails. Although the eToy artists registered their domain name, they did not register eToy as a trademark in the United States.
eToys claimed trademark infringement in court and argued that the eToys trademark and brand name were being tarnished by the “unlawful” activities of the artists, whose projects include profanity and nudity.
The company won a temporary injunction by citing the “danger” to children who might mistakenly log on to www.etoy.com by failing to type an “s” in the Web address. The judge accepted this preposterous argument, and Internic, the domain-registration authority, pulled the plug on www.etoy.com.
But in no time at all eToys discovered what it is like to be on the receiving end of an online community’s rage. Apart from the deluge of hostile e-mails, eToys’s servers were subjected to sustained “denial- of-service” attacks, which are potentially disastrous over Christmas season. eToys claims that it lost only 2% of its capacity as a result, but industry gossip puts the degradation considerably higher.
Whatever the damage, eToys saw the light – it has agreed to drop its suit against eToy
and pay the group up to $40E000 in legal fees and expenses.