Etoy Update

Time for an etoy.com news roundup. The Etoy artists are still operating under a ridiculous injunction that bars them from operating a website at their domain. NSI caved to what they perceived as a court order and put the entire domain on hold, so email is blocked too. And Monday's meeting with the judge turned out to be merely a status conference which, according to Etoy's lawyer, "took all of 45 seconds." Nothing was decided, and the injunction remains in effect. But there's good news about the trademark. Click to read more.

The status conference was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the Monday after Christmas weekend, and Etoy's lawyer wasn't able to attend. Essentially it was the judge checking in with eToys' lawyers; the next meeting is scheduled for Jan.10, but that will probably also be just a status conference.

Here's the good news. According to Etoy's lawyer, one of eToys' major claims to trademarked ownership of "etoy" has been shot down.

eToys had purchased the trademark "ETOYS" from Etna Toys, a New York importer which had secured the mark for itself in 1990. In this way, the company which hadn't formed a website until 1997 could claim that it owned a trademark older than the art group which had been operating on the web since 1995.

Fortunately for Etoy, the Trademark Office decided that "ETOYS" was too generic to be trademarked, and invalidated it. According to this decision, prefixing "e" to the generic term "toys" is not enough to make it trademarkable. This decision may yet be overturned, but it's looking more promising by the day.

Meanwhile, Wired reports that John Perry Barlow and Douglas Rushkoff have joined the etoy crisis advisory board. Barlow calls this domain name dispute "the battle of Bull Run." He's got a point - NSI has taken a highly unusual action based solely on the bullying of a legal firm and a single clueless judge. If that matters more than the time-tested rules of the internet, we're all in trouble. Barlow says that Jon Postel, who worked so hard to establish those rules, would be in tears.

TBTF points out that eToys' stock has been plummeting since Dec.1 and asks why. Since that story, it has continued to fall. Some think this has something to do with their bullying Etoy; others disagree; there are some good comments in the Take It Offline forum that TBTF started.

Etoy's supporters' website at toywar.com promises "TOYWAR.com 1.0 will leave the etoy.BETA-LABS in a few days" but it's been saying that for weeks.

Finally, Etoy's friends at RTMark have taken it upon themselves to wage a game against eToys. The point is apparently to drive their stock price to zero. To me, this sounds about as fun as Quake over a 1200 baud modem, but maybe I'm just too bourgeois.

Comments

ETOYS BACKS DOWN!

[WilliamX]

http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,33330,00.html

NSI is the problem here.

[jeroenb]

I don't really care about all the legal problems concerning trademarks and patents. It'll probably be a long time before we see the end of those, but I'm disappointed in NSI. I more or less expected them to be around long enough to understand that they should simply stand-by and wait for the judge to actually tell them to pull etoy from their database.

Because no matter what the actual result in this case is, companies might start getting ideas like "hmm I can always start some lame campaign against my competitor to have his domainname set on hold for a while." This could only be the beginning, and it's already bad :(