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eToys Inc. Drops etoy Suit - For Real This Time
From: "etoy.AGENT027" [agent027@mail.toybomb.com]
Subject: VICTORY*VICTORY*VICTORY*VICTORY*VICTORY!
OFFICIAL etoy.PRESS-RELEASE:
TOTAL VICTORY for the etoy.CORPORATION AND THE INTERNET COMMUNITY ((WHICH PROVED THAT THE NET IS NOT YET IN THE HANDS OF E-COMMERCE GIANTS)).
NOBODY INVESTS TO LOSE MONEY! NOT EVEN MEDIA ARTISTS...
"MONEY AND SHARES ARE THE OBJECTS OF OUR DESIRE... BUT ART IS WHAT WE WOULD KILL FOR..." *
thank you for flying etoy....
_______________________________________
*QUOTE etoy.DAVE, TONGA 1994
(SANTA MONICA / ZUERICH / NEW YORK)
THE LAWSUIT AGAINST etoy IS DROPPED!
according to the etoy.LAWYERS chris truax in san diego and peter e. wild in zurich eToys Inc. gave up its naive fight against the famous international art group etoy this tuesday after a long and exhausting dispute about the terms and conditions of this settlement.
on monday, january 24, 2000, the TOYWAR.crisis-control-board, 1345 special TOYWAR.agents and media warriors triggered another firestorm : within a few hours many hundred EMAIL-TOY-BOMBS exploded in the brains of customers, e-shoppers, brokers and nervous business men all over the world.
no one got hurt - but the message is placed and the eToys share value sunk below its initial price of $20: value on tuesday / 11.12 AM: $19.0625 per share unit.
one of the targets of the violence-free toy-bombing was the eToys HQ in santa monica .. eToys felt that it is now time to drop this lawsuit and to accept all the demands the etoy.CORPORATION submitted.
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO DO BUSINESS WITH ONE OF THE BIGGEST E-COMMERCE GIANTS IN THE WORLD: F*U*C*K*I*N*G* INTENSE & REALLY EXPENSIVE BUT A KICK FOR ALL OF US! WE ALL LEARNED A LOT.
WE THANK ALL THE BRAVE AGENTS WHO LINED UP BEHIND US TO PROTECT THE ART BRAND "etoy" & FREEDOM ON THE NET!
all agents on TOYWAR.com get rewarded with etoy.SHARES and special compensations.
TOYWAR.heros will be awarded with etoy.MEDALS and TOYWAR.titles after champagne and drugs left the bodies of the TOYWAR.crisis-control- board-members.
THIS IS A GREAT MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF INTERNET ART!
for one time we avoid long statements and launch the party rockets...
signed and verified: the etoy.BOARD
(MORE INFORMATION SOON!)
etoy.CRISIS-PRESS-OFFICE: 0041 1 242 40 81
etoy.PRESS-FTP: ftp://212.71.98.169/pub
____________________
if you joined this community because of the lawsuit....you can now
unsubscribe@toybomb.com without any negative feelings! good bye & it was
nice to meet you. otherwise stay tuned and wait for even more exciting
media viruses and twisted business plans from the etoy.LABORATORIES. we
are not done yet.
LAST MESSAGE TO the eToys LEGAL-DEPT:
THANK YOU FOR HELPING US GROW!
I'm still waiting for jamie (/. regular) to publish something about the Superbowl of Domain Name Disputes (need to trademark that title :) !! ) -- the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball are all going after a company called FlairMail (www.FlairMail.com) that makes vanity email addresses (like HotMail addresses, but you get to have [myname]@goyankees.com or [myname]@bulls1.net, instead of advertising for a Bill Gates subsidiary) available for FREE to subscribers. All of the sports vanity names are DIFFERENT from the team names, by adding "go" or "1," and several non-sports names are also available. FlairMail has NEVER claimed to be endorsed, sponsored, or approved by the sports leagues (and it doesn't have to be -- the law does not require the approval of the sports leagues).
Some fans who buy hats and clothing or who subscribe for vanity email addresses may perfer to pay extra for the knowledge that they have the "official" product. Other customers may not prefer to pay extra. The bottom line (and there are quite a few court cases to prove it) is that THAT CHOICE BELONGS WITH THE CUSTOMERS. The sports leagues do not have the right to make that choice for them. But that doesn't stop sports licensing organizations from trying. For example, a couple of months ago, Collegiate Licensing went after a father and son in Ohio for selling "Beat Michigan" sweatshirts. Collegiate Licensing claimed it violated U of Michigan's trademarks. I live in Ann Arbor and I graduated from Michigan law school, and no matter how big a Michigan fan I am, I am still upset and embarrassed by the greed of Collegiate Licensing.
There are lots of other Goliath v. David lawsuits pending or that have been resolved by the courts. Here is a sample (less than a third of the examples I know about):
Avery-Dennison vs. Sumpton -- Vanity Email Business had to go through trial and appeal before "little guy" won on appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Appeals court told the trial court to consider awarding attorneys' fees to deter the big company from doing the same thing again.
Hasbro vs. Clue Computing -- It only cost Eric Robison, a Colorado computer consultant, $100,000 and his marriage to defend himself after toy giant Hasbro decided it wanted to take over the domain name www.clue.com . Robison ultimately "won" in the sense that the court said he could keep his domain name. But did he really "Win?"
Northern Light Technology vs. NorthernLights.com A search engine was not happy enough with its own domain name and the roughly 300+ additional domain names that NLT registered. So the search engine (which is named after a clipper ship) sued one of its neighbors (which uses the domain name NorthernLights.com -- a reference to the Aurora Borealis), in an effort to take over that domain name, too. The defendant (NorthernLights.com) was using the domain name almost an entire year before the search engine website was launched. The case is still pending in Boston federal court. The judge has suppressed the expressive activity of the little guy by ordering a black "jump page" to be posted in front of his website. (I confess I have a personal interest in this one and the "Superbowl" case.) See http://www.NorthernLights.com/new/
HealthNet.org -- this website belongs to a charitible group of international physicians. However, there is an insurance comapny in California that already owns HealthNet.com and HealthNet.net. As you can imagine, the Insurance company sent a threatening letter to the physicians' organization, who had to file a lawsuit to defend themselves in Boston.
There are many more examples, but I'm tired of typing.
And Congress isn't helping to fix things. Some members of Congress are actually trying to make things WORSE! Congress is making things worse by passing laws that encourage more of these kinds of lawsuits. Senator Abraham of Michigan (who is up for re-election this year), along with Senators McCain and Hatch (who also needed campaign $$ this year), were the original sponsors of S 1255 -- the original so-called "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act."
The "Cybersquatting Act" did not need to be passed -- existing trademark law already provided adequate remedies in cases of REAL cybersquatting. Remember, Dennis Toeppen lost all his lawsuits, even without the passage of the law. What the law REALLY does is that it allows Hasbro to threaten Eric Robison with $100,000 in punitive damages if Robison doesn't give up and settle. The law lets Health Net the big insurance company threaten the charity HealthNet.org with $100,000 in punitive damages if the charity does not cave.
Some of the "Internet-smartest" law professors, like Johnathan Zittrain of Harvard, signed onto a letter by the Association for Computing Machinery opposing the "Cybersquatting Bill," but Congress ignored the advice of people who know something about the Internet. The Clinton Administrration was on record as opposing the bill (but remember the line-item veto was struck down as Unconstitutional).
To make a long story short, at 4:00 in the morning on the day the Omnibus Appropriations Act (essentially the budget for the Whole Government) was up for a vote, Senator Trent Lott, Congressman James Rogan, Senator Abraham, and Congressman Howard Coble slipped the so-called "Cybersquatting Bill" into the Appropriations Act. The "Cybersqatting Bill" could not have passed Congress any other way. Which leaves nonprofits, small businesses, artists, and others (like ETOY) at the mercy of big commercial enterprises (like eToys).
So what do you do about it? I have in mind what I call an "Open Source Democracy Project" to help communicate to Senator Abraham and others that decisionmaking about the Internet needs to be done in the open -- subject to public scrutiny and with input from the Internet community. Decisionmaking about the Internet needs to be done with the interests of the entire community in mind and not just a few big-$$ campaign contributors.
If any /. readers are interested in helping to use Open Source methods of collaboration and cooperation in order to achieve political ends -- to communicate effectively with elected representitives, the I urge you to contact me at your earliest convenience. Specific skills that are needed are (1) factual research (fact gathering), (2) writing, (3) high-quality website design, (4) fact-checking (we need to be absolutely accurate), and (5) publicity. If the project is a community project, it will be FAR MORE EFFECTIVE than a single person's efforts ever could be.
Eric C. Grimm
Attorney at Law
CyberBrief, PLC
Ann Arbor, Michigan
eric.grimm@CyberBrief.net
After reading about certain events in the ongoing DVD scuffle over the past while, we now have something to be happy about.
But...
Etoy simply backed down, rather than have a court rule on it. I was kind of hoping (like many others) that this would set a precendent to avoid this kind of crap in the future.
I hope something like this doesn't happen again, or the accused would be back to square one. Another thing to note is that Etoy fought *hard* to retain their rights, much harder than most people would. I have incredible respect for those guys. I hope the victims of any future abuse follow their example.