A protest group that led an online attack against toy seller eToys.com in December said its threat of a similar campaign against Autodesk was enough to convince the graphics software maker to back down from a trademark infringement suit.

RTMark (pronounced "art mark") claimed Wednesday that Autodesk "buckled" after being threatened with an "eToys-style attack" - which called for e-mail campaigns and denial-of-service assaults intended to bog down the company's servers. But while Autodesk acknowledged that "public pressure" influenced its decision to drop its infringement claim against The3DStudio.com, Autodesk officials said the dispute was ultimately resolved because the site owner agreed to post requested disclaimers.

"We don't cow to threats," said Martin Konopken, senior corporate counsel at Autodesk, on Wednesday. "We resolved the issue because we felt [the site owner] was acting in good faith and we felt we were dealing with a reasonable person."

Denial-of-service attacks by an unknown hacker or hackers disrupted the operations of a number of the Web's most popular sites this week, including Amazon.com, Yahoo! and E*Trade. However, a spokesman for RTMark said those attacks should not be compared to the efforts of his and other online protest groups.

At issue was The3DStudio.com domain, an online forum set up by designer Matthew Anderson last October to allow 3D artists to share graphics. Autodesk - which owns the trademark to a high-end 3D design program called 3DStudio - said it began receiving complaints from 3DStudio customers who claimed their copyrighted works were being distributed on Anderson's site without their permission. Those users, Konopken said, believed that Autodesk operated or sponsored The3Dstudio.com site and that Autodesk was "wrongfully using their copyrighted images."

Those customer complaints led to a Jan. 26 letter from Autodesk's legal representatives to Anderson, raising the trademark infringement issue and demanding that Anderson "relinquish the The3DStudio.com domain name" to Autodesk within 15 days. "We got alarmed because we felt these images were damaging our reputation," explained Konopken.

For his part, Anderson said that he responded immediately. He said he told the company that he had addressed copyright complaints relating to an image on his site. Anderson said he also offered to post a disclaimer telling site visitors that The3DStudio.com was not owned or sponsored by Autodesk, even though Autodesk had tacitly endorsed his online efforts by including a link to The3DStudio.com site in one of Autodesk's own graphics forums.

Anderson enlisted the aid of The3DStudio.com supporters by asking them to send e-mails to Autodesk voicing their support for his forum. But when he failed to hear back from Autodesk representatives and with the deadline looming, Anderson sought the support of RTMark, which agreed to add the Autodesk campaign to a number of online trademark disputes in which it is involved (rtmark.com/autodesk.html).

Last weekend, RTMark spokesman Ernest Lucha said, the group notified Autodesk that it would launch an online protest. But before RTMark could marshall its supporters, Konopken, who said he had been out of town and unaware of the growing controversy over The3Dstudio.com , was able to come to terms with Anderson.

The3DStudio.com now sports a disclaimer stating the site is not affliated with Autodesk or its subsidiaries.

"I would be dishonest to say the public pressure didn't influence me. That would be disingenuous," said Autodesk's Konopken. "But we're not a company willing to back down if we believe we're in the right. If I thought there was no reasonable resolution and we would have to go to court to resolve it, then I would have gone to our CEO to discuss doing just that. In this case, we were able to reach an agreement."

Nonetheless, RTMark is claiming victory on behalf of Anderson and The3DStudio.com, saying the threat of its protest campaign was enough to bring Autodesk to the bargaining table. "Now if they jump like that before being threatened, we'll have achieved something nice," RTMark's Lucha said in a Feb. 9 press release distributed online. "So many companies are still behaving like thugs on the Web."

Anderson said he is happy to see the infringement suit resolved, but would have continued with the protest campaigns if necessary. "While I don't really agree with the hacking tactics being used against Yahoo! and those other sites, I don't think a virtual sit-in is a bad thing. That's checks and balances," Anderson said. "I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if you want to protest by saying 'Let's all go out there and hit our refresh buttons for an hour to bog down a site.' "

Lucha said that while his group would continue to employ a variety of protest tactics, he says recent unexplained hacker attacks are different.