Here is a story to make megacorp executives choke on their muesli: eToys.com, a huge online retailer of children's toys based in Santa Monica, California, has been comprehensively humiliated by a massive 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 a site named www.etoy.com, which has been up since 1995 and 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 US. Why should they - they weren't doing business. But this was exactly the loophole that the eToys lawyers needed.
They 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 Web projects sometimes include profanity and nudity.
The company won a temporary injunction by citing the 'danger' to children who might mistakenly log on to the www.etoy.com site by failing to type an 's' in the Web address. eToys also claimed it could lose customers because of such confusion.
The judge accepted this preposterous argument, and suddenly www.etoy.com disappeared from the Net because Internic, the domain-registration authority, pulled the plug on it.
The artists also lost their email connections. In the real world that would probably have been that. But the idea that a gaggle of corporate lawyers and a Californian judge could infringe the freedom of expression of artists in another continent struck a raw nerve across the Net.
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 emails, the company's servers were subjected to sustained 'denial-of-service' attacks, which are bad news for an e-commerce site at any time, but potentially disastrous over Christmas season. eToys claims that it lost only 2 per cent of its capacity as a result, but industry gossip puts the degradation considerably higher.
Whatever the extent of the damage, eToys eventually saw the light. The company has announced that it has agreed to drop its suit against eToys and to pay the group up to $40,000 in legal fees and expenses. The case is already being hailed as 'the Brent Spar of Cyberspace', which may be a bit over the top. But eToys' bruising experience suggests that corporations should think twice before taking on the Net.
OLD HABITS die hard, though. The next group in line to learn this expensive lesson are the corporations seeking to control DVD (Digital Video Disc) technology. If you have a PC or Macintosh computer with an appropriate drive, you can play DVD movies on it. But if you run the Linux operating system you cannot, because the appropriate decryption software does not exist. Accordingly, various programmers have - legally - worked out a programme (DeCSS) which decrypts DVDs and makes it possible to view them on Linux systems.
Last Tuesday morning, Norwegian police, egged on by lawyers for US movie studios, arrested one of them - 16-year-old Jon Johansen, who had posted the DeCSS code on his father's website.
The lad was held and questioned for seven hours before being released. The whole thing stems from a clause inserted (after lobbying by the movie moguls) into the US 1999 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which some lawyers expect to be ruled unconstitutional.
What it looks like to the rest of us is yet another example of US corporations trying to intimidate the Net community. Will these people never learn?
john.naughton@observer.co.uk
For links and background material see: www.briefhistory.com/footnotes/
