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etoy.com Returns
The lawyers have been on the phone, and etoy.com is finally back up, after over two months of outage. Hopefully this marks the an end to all the legal wranglings with eToys. See the most recent story for the details on what's happened over the last few weeks.
clearly in this sector delivery times are critical, and matter to their customer base much more than a bit of corporate bulldozing. Remember, your average net consumer doesn't care about (until recently) obscure European conceptual artists. They care about getting little Jonny's toy on time, and eToys were below industry standard here.
I think that the result is fantastic, and was registered on toywar a while back, but I, and the average slashdotter, are not the same as the standard net user. The stock fall had very little to do with the domain dispute.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
You should be aware that toywar managed to get several people to QUIT etoys ?
:)
I am pretty certain that it was toywar that did most of the stock-crashing. They drove the stocks down with false orders, threatening emails, flaming emails, and so forth. The entire company got the "wrath of the internet" poured down their shirts. They didn't have a chance.
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - arcade@kvine-nospam.sdal.com - arcade@efnet
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
First we have this wonderful timeline of events and eToys' stock price. But perhaps that's all propaganda...
Who is eToys target customer?
That would be net-savvy or at least net-capable people. The kind of people that would be bound to come across the massive amount of unfavorable eToys press. The kind of people who would have to be blind to miss half the protest sites if they did a search on eToys.
Who is eToys target investor?
People who are subject to all of the above but also get to read all the bad investor news.
To top it all off, you have people who realize that if Etoys is looking at controlling the etoy.com content we should wonder what kind of content they have. Now the FCC does too. Hmmm, I wonder who sent the information on over 350 mismarketed products?
No. Toywar had nothing to do with the fall of eToys, and Slashdot is a powerless entity as well. The only people who want you to believe that is companies who don't want to face their own toywar.
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No Zen is good zen
The fundamental goal of E-Toys, like any corporation, is to make money for its shareholders. Have you seen what this action did to its stock price? See that peak at the left, that's when they filed suit. By Xmas, they were less than half that value, during a very busy and very profitable shopping season. By now, their share price is below their initial IPO value of $19.
There was no legal precident set, but hopefully we have set the meme in corporate minds that if you take frivolous action against people on the internet, you risk a Public Relations and Financial disaster. If the cause is just, we don't need the courts anymore.
Legal backing would have been nice, but the US Courts have an iffy record of upholding peoples rights in the face of high paid corporate lawyers, so unless the courts change I wouldn't count on their help.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I saw it also. I think they did it on purpose. If they claim the parody aspect. they more than likely will get away with it. Too bad they;re being so flamboyant, betcha it'll come back to haunt them.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
(IIRC, the court order simply said that etoy couldn't use it, not that they couldn't own it.)
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rooooar
I wondered the same myself. When the article was first posted on /. that etoy had "won," I pointed Netscape over to their site to see how things were going. I half expected some sort of party going on. I was disappointed, however, when I found out that their site was down... what's the deal with this? Can etoy sue for something like this? I'm not advocating going off and suing everyone that is bad/gets in your way, but heck, I figure that if they're going to make a point, they need to make it.
Just my $0.0000002 worth.
Insert mind here.
Umm, no they didn't. Etoys dropped the suit in the face of public pressure, the courts did nothing but grant the injunction AGAINST etoy.
No ruling for justice here. The US courts maintain their current status of "money talks".
E-Toys managed to shutdown etoy.com through the holiday season. My guess is that that is all they wanted. They probably knew that they had no chance before they filed the lawsuit. But they knew that they could create a temporary disturbance.
Of course, they aren't the first ones to do this. The RIAA has been doing this sort of thing for years. They had no legal grounds on which to sue Diamond, yet Diamond was eventually forced to incorporate the RIAA's copy-protection features into the Rio because they did not have the money to continue the lawsuit. The MPAA is also fond of this sort of strategy.
We need to stop this bullshit. It seems that corporations have been gaining way too much power lately. If we don't do something, I fear that this will continue until we are living in a virtual dictatorship, with the real government completely under the control of the big corporations. Call me paranoid, but it seems to be the trend everywhere outside the Open Source community.
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-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
considering that their stock dropped from $65 to less than $20, I wouldn't say they won...
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I agree, I clicked the link to see the site and get a feel for what they really did prior to all the legal noise, but the site was just a "We Beat City Hall" flag. Granted they did, to an extend, but I left rather than dig down into the site because of the rah rah stuff..
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Um, have you even read any of the stories on the topic? etoy owned the name years before etoys even existed
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+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Is the boycott over? Can I buy my Pokemon stuff now?
Isn't this just great? A gang of European homosexuals and drug abusers steals (yes, steals) the "good name" of an honest company, and the tort monster chews them up and spits them out. "Sorry guys! You don't own your own name any more!"
To put it bluntly, etoy.com didn't rip off the etoys.com name. Quite the contrary; etoy.com was up and running a full two years before etoys.com ever existed. Etoys.com is the real ripoff, not etoy.com.
And by the way, where did you ever get the idea that the etoy.com crew was "a gang of European homosexuals and drug abusers"? They are European, but I've never seen anything indicating that they were, or weren't for that matter, either gay or drug users. I very much doubt you've got proof either. Or are you just being a prejudiced bastard? The latter seems quite likely.
By the way, the only way I can see that you'd even get that idea is if you knew what it was they did. In which case, I find it very hard to believe that you wouldn't know that etoy.com had the name long before etoys.com did. Or are you one of those types that believe that those with money should be allowed to plunder those who do not, simply because they have the resources to do so?
Before I go any further I should state that I am, in fact, a capitalist. So don't go accusing me of being a socialist of any kind.
If you don't own your own name, what do you own? Not much. Just whatever pittance is left to you by the radical leftists who control the government.
Agreed, totally. Etoy.com does own its own name. Etoys.com would have stolen it given the chance, but thankfully the courts ruled for justice (a nice change).
Do they even care what a savage disincentive this is for business?
What, the fact that you can't steal from someone else? How's that a disincentive for business (well, those businesses that don't involve stealing anyway)?
"Freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength" quoth the famous Socialist George Orwell
If you're going to quote, please quote in context. You completely ruin the effect otherwise.
Yet another irrational outburst of mindless has swept Slashdot.
Yep. And I feel bad for responding to it, but you've left me little in the way of a choice, since I can't mod this one down.
By the way, I think the word you were looking for was "mindlessness." "Mindless" is an adjective; "mindlessness" is a noun. You can't have a "wave of mindless."
Ho, hum. I doubt very much that any of you have any concept of property rights at all.
You're right; you don't have any concept of property rights at all (and you're certainly a part of "any of you [Slashdotters]"). At least, not as applies to people. You appear to be the type who thinks that a business can take anything owned by an ordinary person with no compensation therefor, simply because as you seem to see it business is always right. Furthermore, you seem to be so ardent in your beliefs that you don't even bother to research the things you argue about, at least not thoroughly enough to make any real arguments. And I haven't even touched on your apparent bigotry yet. But that's for another post.
Before the lawsuit, who had heard of etoy? I know I hadn't. And was there any chance of such a poorly designed site being mentioned repeatedly in the news? Probably not. etoy.com recieved more publicity from this lawsuit than they could have ever hoped to recieve in any other way. And etoy.com was never even in competition with etoys.com, right? So what was really behind this lawsuit?
Sounded pretty damn good to me. Must be my superior sound card. *shrugs*
WHY IS EVERYONE SO GOD DAMNED NEGATIVE?
If they were thinking ahead, they would have trolled for some banner sales to be on thier site when it came back up. When I went to the site earlier there were none. Too bad, they could have re-couped some of those legal expenses just from the /. hits alone.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.