eToys Drops Lawsuit Against eToy

A lot of people have caught the word that eToys has dropped their lawsuit against eToy. This story has been brewing around here for a while. It's good to see the side of reason prevail in this situation. The solution that eToys is proposing is that both sides drop their respective claims against each other (eToys and eToy both have claims against each other) I've talked with Ken Ross, eToys VP of Communications. Click below for his take on it.

Essentially, eToys has proposed that both parties drop their respective claims against each other. This means that the injunction against against Etoy would be dropped.

The reason they're trying to do this is that they've heard from people, quite a bit over the last few weeks. Quite a number of people from the arts community had contacted them, and they are responding to this, says Ken Ross of eToys.

Comments

coinky dink?

[zonker]

I figured this would happen... right after Christmas... Coincidence? I think NOT!

/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /

Re:coinky dink?

[KnightStalker]

No kidding! This has nothing to do with the "side of reason." I bet Amazon is right behind them dropping their suit against B&N... the Christmas shopping season is mostly over, so the injunctions are no longer necessary.

HEY! THAT'S NOT 'DROPPED' YET!

[Nicolas MONNET]

They just said they won't 'press' the suit, whatever it means.

This should have gone to court...

[xyzzy]

...but not for the obvious reason.

If it had gone to court, and Etoy WON, it probably would have been a precident-setting decision. Now, of course, we will probably have to go through this AGAIN with the next bone-head that tries to sue over similar names.

...But they would have lost

[Uruk]

I hate to be a cynical troll bastard, but the truth of the matter is that they probably would have lost horribly. I agree that it would be a very important precedent setter if they had won, but that knife cuts both ways.

What is the part of the pledge of allegiance that everybody learns but that is never actually *IN* the pledge of allegiance? "With Freedom, and Justice for all those who can afford it". Hate to say it, but whoever has more money generally wins due to better lawyers, and more expendable time/energy/money that gets put into winning it.

Don't be naive.

[Parity]

eToys shut down etoy to increase their margin through the holiday shopping season. The holiday shopping season is now over, and the boycott is more dangerous to them than the tiny percentage of customers they lose to mistyped urls.

Not to mention that the lawsuit hasn't yet been dropped, their just making compromising noises, aka 'spin doctoring.' I feel no compunction to reward someone for trying to pull a snow job, thanks anyway.

eToys will probably actually go into my list with Wal*mart and Starbucks of places I will never shop. Every market force -except- consumer awareness encourages corporations to be ruthless and to care about nothing but profit. Unless the senior management of eToys resigns en masse, I have to assume that that company has no ethical compunctions about being anything but a purely market driven force, and I'd be just as happy to see them go out of business. Maybe if more unethical pure-greed business went under, more people with integrity would feel that business wasn't something too dirty to be involved in, and then everyone (except scumsucking getrichquick at the expense of the suckers types) would win.


--Parity

And I suppose...

[Amphigory]

And I suppose that its entirely coincidental that this happened after the Xmas (please don't associate Christ with that) shopping season?

If the lawsuit wasn't both valid and necessary, why did they pursue it in the first place???

Re:Glad to hear it!

[FreeUser]

I sincerely hope you are joking.

First, they haven't said "dropping" the lawsuite, they've said "not pressing it." There may be a difference, legally speaking. Since I'm obviously not a lawyer, I'll let someone more in the know comment. In the meantime a measure of skepticism is called for.

Second, even if they are actually dropping the lawsuite, that may very well have been been their strategy from the start: get etoy.com taken off the internet during the busy xmas season, then drop a costly lawsuite they can't win anyway after the holiday is over. By next year they would (hopefully) have enough name recognition for it not to be as big an issue, they may have acquired the name, or chosen some other tactic to address the issue.

The other possibility is, of course, that they have wisely caved in to widespread outrage among both the artistic and technical communities and have found their legal tactics to have backfired in a business sense, costing them allot of money. That may or may not indirectly be related to their stock price falling, though of course those of us who boycotted them would like to believe it to be so.

Either way, the only reward they may have earned is an end to a boycott, not active support from those they harmed (and that group includes IMHO the entire internet community). However, until I see them actually make good (a public apology at the very least, more preferably paying etoy.com's legal expenses), I will continue to withhold my money from their pockets.

Welcome to the Good Olde Days of the wild west

[Mr. Protocol]

This is a skirmish in a wider war, a war that's going to go on for a long, long time.

We live by the rule of law. Man, there are times when it hurts to say that. The Internet wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for the secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) admiration of many of its builders for the outlaw image. Except for Peter Neumann, of course. However, I live in a neighborhood where I'm glad the police saturate the streets, having had many personal belongings appropriated by other residents of the neighborhood in my absence, over the years.

But in any frontier, society arrives first and the law plays catch-up. These are the Good Old Days of the Internet, folks, and you should enjoy them while you can. Trademark law, copyright law, trade secret protection, contract law, all are having real, and in some cases severe, problems adapting to the new territory.

Eventually, all of this will get fixed. But it's going to get fixed in the light of what we do now, during the period of time when things don't work so good. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and the Internet violates so many of the assumptions under which the existing legal framework was constructed that sometimes it's hard to hear the packets whiz by for all the squeaking.

So when something like this comes up, I think it's a good idea to think about the situation not in terms of "big ugly bad corporation against innocent little guy", but in terms of: "Suppose I owned etoys.com? Suppose I owned etoy.com? Suppose I were a customer of one? Of the other?"

This might help provide a perspective on the real issues. Remember, ownership doesn't depend on how nasty the owner is. Our legal system is founded on the theory that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, even if you're a vegetarian.

Once you've gained that perspective...well, then it's time to beat up on the big ugly bad guy. Hopefully, with better weapons in your intellectual arsenal.

It's about time, but...

[DaPhreaker]

I applaud etoys decision to drop the suit, and the people of the Internet community that pushed them in that direction, but there is a more significant issue at stake. How did they ever get the injunction in the first place? The mere fact they won a temporary injunction is frightening to me. Based on the fact that they never owned the domain, it was not even the same name, and last but far from least etoy was around years before etoys, how could any rational person grant an injunction, it boggles the mind. At this point it looks good for the Internet community you know, all is well that ends well and that type of stuff. But what is going to be the out come when this happens again? And what will happen when the site in question is not an internationally acclaimed web site? Will that web site receive the same support as etoy received? The fact that etoys is pulling the suit is a step in the right direction, but there needs to be a clearly defined procedure in place that will not allow this to happen again. And it should be defined by the people/institutions who make the Internet thrive and not by those who thrive off the Internet. Maybe etoy should follow through with their suit and put the screws to etoys. If they win then it would be a major coup for the internet community, something that would make Mr. A. Huge Korporation think twice about hassling little Johnny web site owner. Removing the injunction is wonderful, but that only remedies a symptom, the cause is what needs to be fixed.

Flame works for us - live with it!

[konstant]

So here we have another victory for flame, one of seemingly dozens that I've seen since I began trawling Slashdot. CmdrTaco posts an "outrage" story, thousands of screaming techno monkeys are released from their cages, and the "evildoer" is inundated with everything that the more sanctimonious Slashdotters hate: brainless insults, threats, aimless fury, severance of business relations, and (presumably) a little rational argument thrown in for seasoning.

And the result? WE WIN!

Let me spell that out again for you sourpusses who can't abide being represented by puerile mudslingers.

W E W I N E V E R Y T I M E

Now I'm sure some of the aforementioned are already warming up their typing fingers to explain how we don't really win, that this sort of victory is phyrric, that we can only reduce our influence and tarnish our credibility by proceeding in this way, and that eventually we will be ignored.

I disagree. Oh, how much I disagree! I say, it's time we stop shunning natural righteous anger. How long will we claim that human emotion is a bastard of which we should be ashamed? Forget it, no, if the actions of another anger me, then I won't suppress that anger in pursuit of the ideal Spock-like discourse that the Slashdot ethics police endorse.

Rational argument is fundamental, I disagree. But not all atrocities or moral infractions have their roots in reason. Some are emotional, or even legitimately evil. Those cannot be address by reason; emotion must be an allowable tool in our arsenal.

My two cents.

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

Re:Flame works for us - live with it!

[Gromer]

I most emphatically disagree with your take on this. First of all, this specific situation. Your argument is a classic post hoc argument, and is quite groundless. You have no evidence at all that the Slashdot flameage had anything to do with eToys' descision. For all we know, this could have ended weeks ago, and only eToys' frustration with the flames kept it going this long. In fact, they say that it was the artistic community's response (not, be it noted, the technology community's response) that led to the dropping of the suit. Furthermore, it seems far more likely that what provoked eToys' withdrawal was not either communities' response, but simple damage control. This was always simply an intimidation measure, to try and force eToy to relinquish their domain name. eToy, to their credit, refused to be bullied, and eToys had to face the possibility of spending a huge amount of money on a possibly unwinnable suit, and facing eToy's countersuit. In the face of these dangers, it is entirely predictable that they would back down, flamers or no flamers. On the whole, there is no reason to believe that Slashdot flameage had anything to do with this.

Furthermore, in general terms, nobody is advocating a Spock-like devotion to pure reason, and few people (least of all me) would argue for the supression of emotion. Emotion is a powerful, and often useful, motivating force. Anger and indignation, both emotions which Slashdot posessed in the extreme, can cause us to rise up and oppose wrongs which a purely rational being might not, regarding the battle as unwinnable or not sufficiently relevant to his or her self-interest. Emotion can be a powerful motivator for good.

However, it can also be a powerful force for evil. The problem with anger, and especially its close relative, hate, is that it is morally and intellectually neutral. It is as easy to become angry over a right as over a wrong- anger has no judgement. In fact, historically, much evil, and very little good, has come of large-scale anger and hatred. The Holocaust is a classic case of what anger and hate can do, and I presume no-one here will try to tell me that was righteous, justified anger.

The point is that rational argument, even rational argument backed by intense passion, could never have led to the Holocaust- there simply isn't an even remotely plausible argument by which exterminating 6 million people makes sense. Some people would believe such an argument, but they would be by far the minority. As long as an environment exists in which opposing ideas are tolerated, intelligent discussion is encouraged, and rationality and judgement are the ground rules, the majority would never permit the Holocaust. The Holocaust came about because the Nazis created an environement in which the above conditions did not apply- dissention was viewed with suspicion and hostility, intelligent discussion was criticized as head-in-the-clouds academic (Spock-like?) nonsense, and above all, the ground rules were hatred and fear. Once that happened, all was lost, and it took the utter defeat of WW2 to bring Germany to its senses.

To return to the more prosaic matter of Slashdot flameage, the same principles apply, although the stakes are (obviously) far lower. Let us suppose that it really was the avalanche of flames that beat eToys into submission. If so, it was not the truth of our arguments that brought this about, but our anger, and their fear and frustration. We would have become the bully in our eagerness to defeat the bully. The Slashdot community may have been in the right in this case, but that may not always be true. Surely you can accept the possibility that Slashdotters, for whatever reason, may someday be on the wrong side of an important judgement. In such a case, the flames would be exactly as effective as if Slashdot were in the right. You said it yourself- "We win every time" (reformattted for legibility, of course). This is what I mean by anger being morally and intellectually neutral- the power of a flame does not in anyway depend on the correctness of the view expressed. The objective of any sort of argument or discussion is (or at least ought to be) the selection of a more-or-less correct course of action. This is why rational discussion is so important. If matters were decided by shouting matches, we might as well roll dice, for all the difference it makes in terms of the correctness of the outcome. Rational discussion is the only form of argument which is in any way biased in favor of right over wrong.

In short, the point I am making is that the goal of an argument is not to win, but to arrive at a solution. Flaming and anger support the former, but rational argument supports the latter, and it is for that reason, and not out of some Vulcan shame of my emotions, that I value a strong rational argument infinitely more than any amount of seemingly righteous anger.

Hasn't their goal been achieved?

[|DaBuzz|]

I mean, if you think about the timing of the law suit, Etoys.com main goal was to prevent people from going to Etoy.com when they meant to go to Etoys.com. The best way to fix this type of confusion beyond hijacking the domain and redirecting it is to bring it down all together.

Scenario:

Customer remembers something about the "etoy" toystore on the web from a TV commercial so they punch up Etoy.com into their browser ... if Etoys.com hadn't brought etoy.com down, that user may have been marveled by the content of etoy.com and forgotten that they wanted to go to etoys.com in the first place, only later to go to toysrus.com. If Etoy.com fails to resolve for the customer, there is more of a chance that they'll try "etoys.com" and get to the toy site.

Etoys.com main goal here was to prevent the loss of even a SINGLE possible customer due to the distraction that is etoy.com ... and they did just that.

Now they want to come off as the Good Guys(TM) for not pushing the suit while all along, their plan worked 100% as expected.

Should have...

[Me_n_U]

They SHOULD HAVE just contacted eToy and asked them to put a link on their site for mistakes. I've seen that a few times. That would make to much sense though I guess...

Re:Kinda nice finally

[isaac]

Seems odd how the world today is embroiled in lawsuit after lawsuit. There is no real solution anymore on anything other than to sue other party involved and hope for the best."

Of course. When the Legislative and Executive branches are coopted, the sole remaining (legal) remedy is petitioning the Judiciary for redress of grievances. These days, that's all that stands between this country and a "capitalist paradise" like Singapore.

This is why I mistrust tort-reform measures. Who's interests are represented by Congress? Who's job is it to pass legislation? Worried yet?

-Isaac

Etoy should continue lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

I think without question Etoy should continue their lawsuit agains Etoys. Etoys was clearly out of line and went so far as to even shut down their website. How can we have a government and judicial system that is this stupid about technology and the world in general. I think Etoy should definately continue with their lawsuit and if they agree to continue persuing the suit I would gladly donate to their cause. I think that Etoys deserves to be punished severely for this crap. I think the the only good part about this is that it did get Etoy a lot of publicity, and I think if they tried they could turn that publicity and attention that they have drawn for this case and get enough donations to continue with their lawsuit. Etoys clearly did this for a lot of publicity, so why can't Etoy turn it around on them? I'm hung over and tired, so if you want me to work here you better serve good coffee, and a lot of it.

Re:Sounds like they got nervous

[WilliamX]

I certainly hope etoy does continue their suit against eToys. If they can afford to, it would serve to put corporate America on notice that there are consequences to their legal bullying tactics, and perhaps make them stop and think before acting.

The intellectual property groups, like the RIAA, MPAA, attorneys for companies like AT&T, are working right now to stop new Top Level Domains, like .web, .biz, .box, etc, because they want rules in place that let them suspend someone's domain name rights without having to go meet the legal standards that a court filing would force them to. I am on the Workgroup C group of the Domain Name Supporting Organization of ICANN, and this workgroup is charged with coming up with a proposal or proposals for ICANN to consider in creating new Top Level Domains. The Intellectual Properties advocates have been fighting VERY hard to block any results, despite the fact that the two largest and most contentious camps in this process have been able to find common ground to move forward with 6-10 new top level domains.

Corporate America needs to be taught a lesson that they can't assert rights they don't have, or try and abuse the rights they have, to trample the rights of others. A win by etoy over eToys would go a long way to putting them on notice.

--
William X. Walsh
william@dso.net

What about other domains?

[HomerJ]

etoys.com didn't have a legit suit against etoy.com because not only was etoy.com there first, they have nothing to do with one another. That's not always the case.

For instance. microsfot.com redirects to linux.org. The only reason to have that domain is because it's based on a user making a typo to microsoft.com. Would microsoft have a legit suit against the owner of linux.org because it's using the Microsoft name to get hits, and users?

And what's worse, is a website like gamefaq.com. gamefaqs.com is a well known website where users(mostly under 18) get game information. gamefaq.com is a porn site. Would IGN(of which gamefaqs.com is affiliated) have a legit lawsuit against the owner of gamefaq.com becuase it's trying to lure it's mostly under 18 userbase to a porn site?

The two above examples are, what I think, legit reasons to sue a webiste based on a domainname. Both are shameless attempts to get hits from users typing in the wrong url. I could go on forever with examples, whitehouse.com being anohter one.

Should there be a law, or a line in the NSI contract saying that it would be illegal to have a name based on a typo, or a misleading name? I think it wouldn't be that bad of an idea. Sites like etoy.com would still be legal, even if registered after etoys.com because they aren't selling toys and trying to milk of the etoys.com name. Registering misleading names like gamefaq.com would be illegal, which I think it should be illegal to do so.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions....

[Carnage4Life]

What you have just asked for is a law granting etoys.com the right to do what they did to etoy.com. Let me explain...
There is very little difference between your gamefaqs.com/gamefaq.com example and the etoys.com/etoy.com example. Apart from the similarities in the domain names, when the lawsuit was initiated etoys.com sued etoy.com for misleading consumers even though they were involved in seperate businesses. gamefaqs.com is a video game site while gamefaq.com is a porn site, there is no relation. But I can see a judge closing gamefaq.com for some crap sentimental reasons like not wanting kids to view porn by accident (kinda like not wanting kids or parents to view the "profanity" on the etoy site)... and voila the etoys.com vs. etoy fiasco becomes a legitimate argument on etoys.com side.
Secondly how long will it take before a law like that will be misused especially where the lines blur... I still don't see how the gamefaq.com domain being a porn site and gamefaqs.com being a porn site have anything to do with each other... before long any website with an s after it will be sued by or sue the domain of the same name without the s. Then it'll be a battle of who has better lawyers?

Also do you realize that following your reasoning if etoy.com was created after etoys.com they would have no legal leg to stand on even though their business has nothing to do with selling toys? Bad idea...

A better idea is to follow the existing ICANN Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy which sadly had not been implemented by NSI when this fiasco started.
Under the policy the following must be true for a domain to be disputed:

• the domain name infringes on a trademark

• the owner has no rights to or legitimate interests in the domain

• the domain name is being used in bad faith

.
Those seem like better rules to me than what you suggest and there is less room for misuse or misinterpretation.

Etoys Wins; We Lose

[drben]

We didn't win this one, in spite of the misleading info in the story on slashdot. Etoys did not "drop" the suit but has just agreed "not to press" it. Conveniently, as several have noted in this discussion, right after their goal was met: The holiday shopping rush is over, etoy.com was forced offline during the rush, even though Etoys' trademark application was rejected. Now Etoys gets good publicity (even on slashdot, with one poster even calling for slashdotters to buy toys in jubilation) by declaring that they are "not pressing" the suit. Meanwhile, etoy faces thousands in legal fees. Perhaps Etoys will drop the suit; perhaps the suit will languish in the bottom drawer until, say, the back-to-school shopping rush.

Read more at nofuncharlie.com and RTMark.