eToy Story

by Gar Smith

The battle between e-commerce and e-creativity broke wide open in 1999 when the Internet toy giant eToys (http://www.etoys.com/) tried to destroy etoy (http://www.etoy.com/), the eclectic website of a small group of European artists.

The toy dealers claimed that the artists' site (which pre-dated the corporation's website) was "disturbing" their customers.

Etoy logo

When etoy refused eToys' $500,000 offer to buy its name, the corporation brought suit against the artists. On November 29, eToys' lawyers won a court order shutting down etoy's domain and terminating etoy's email account.

In the pre-internet era, that would have been the end of it: David would have been crushed by Goliath. But etoy picked up a slingshot and loaded it with electrons.

"Hackers are normally apolitical, but [they] have taken eToys' attack on etoy as an attack on themselves," an Internet message announced on December 12, 1999.

"Why should global culture be dominated by business?" asked Ernest Lucha, a spokesperson for RTMark, an anti-corporate website that has been accused of "illegal practices" for publishing information critical of the WTO. RTMark (pronounced "registered trade mark") also created a fake George W. Bush presidential website, which so provoked the Texas Governor that he declared, "There ought to be some limits to freedom!"

RTMark sent out a global invitation to hackers to participate in "a multi-user internet game whose goal is to damage (or possibly even destroy)" eToys. Almost instantaneously, a "toy army" of 1,400 hacktivists was "poised to perform 'operations' on command."

The logic was impeccable: "eToys feels comfortable destroying art for the benefit of its business, so all the players of this game can feel great destroying eToys - for the benefit of art."

The RTMark website was flooded with software programs designed to sabotage eToys' sales during the critical Christmas shopping season. A ten-day "virtual sit-in" crippled the corporation's servers. Meanwhile, eToys' investment boards were flooded with warnings about the attack, prompting many investors to dump their stocks.

Within days, eToys' stock plunged from $67 a share to $20 -- a 70 percent slide. A major e-attack was set to coincide with the release of eToys' annual report but, at the last minute, the beleaguered corporation saw the writing on the screen and agreed to settle.

The artists won back their domain name and eToys dropped its suit "without prejudice," agreeing to pay all court costs and legal expenses.

"This is the Brent Spar of e-commerce," said anti-eToys campaigner Reinhold Grether (referring to a Greenpeace campaign that stopped Shell Oil from dumping an abandoned oil-platform into the North Sea in 1995.) "Just as the petroleum industry learned that it had to listen to environmentalists, so e-commerce companies have now learned that the Internet doesn't belong to them, and they can't do whatever they want with it."

"A precedent has now finally been set," RTMark's Ray Thomas proclaimed. "eToys thought it could act like corporations typically do, but it had no idea how the internet works. Now e-commerce corporations have a choice: Either obtain a legal stranglehold on the internet so that this kind of defensive reaction is no longer possible, or behave decently toward the humans who use this medium for purposes other than profit."

Word of the epic battle is spreading. On January 27, lawyers for software titan Autodesk demanded that the owners of The3Dstudio.com abandon its domain name within 15 days or face a costly lawsuit. (Autodesk markets a software product trademarked "3D Studio." The3Dstudio does not sell software, but gives away freeware models and "texture" graphics.)

On February 4, after futile attempts to reach Autodesk to resolve the issue, The3Dstudio contacted RTMark. One day after RTMark contacted the software aggressor, an Autodesk attorney rushed out a response (on a Saturday) calling RTMark's intervention "premature" and promising prompt action.

On February 7, Autodesk agreed to back off if The3Dstudio would post a disclaimer that it is not affiliated with Autodesk. Previous offers to do just that had been ignored by Autodesk. The company's lawyer expressed relief that "[we] were able to work things out so quickly" and asked for assurance that RTMark would not launch an electronic sabotage campaign.

What you can do Visit the etoy artists at http://www.etoy.com/. Visit RTMark [http://www.rtmark.com/] and check out its website spoofs on Microsoft, the WTO, and George W. Bush. The hacker "toys" that were used to bring a corporate giant to its knees are all stored on the internet [http://www.toywar.com/].