December 29, 1999
Etoys Offers to Drop Suit Against Artists Group
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL 
toys Inc., the Web's leading toy retailer, said on Wednesday that it had offered to drop its trademark-infringement lawsuit against etoy, a European group of online conceptual artists whose supporters have mounted a vigorous Internet-based campaign protesting the toy merchant's actions.
Etoys, which has already won a court order forcing the artists to stop using the Internet address www.etoy.com, said it also was asking the group to move some of its images to other Internet sites.
But a lawyer for etoy said the group would not agree to limit the content on its Web site.
"These are artists, and this is just not acceptable to them," Chris Truax, etoy's lawyer, said in a telephone interview from San Diego. "Etoy cannot give eToys veto power over the content on its site."
Last month etoy was forced to stop using www.etoy.com on the Web, where it had been since 1995. Etoys was not founded until the following year, and put up its Web site in 1997. Unlike etoy, though, eToys holds a United States trademark for its name.
Ken Ross, a spokesman for the Santa Monica, Calif., company, said: "We are initiating an end to the legal actions against etoy. The reason is simple: over the last several weeks, we've received lots and lots of communications that urged us to find a way to coexist with etoy."
Ross added that eToys was asking etoy to find a way to move its "more graphic pages" to other sites, but that it was not a condition for putting an end to the lawsuit. "This is a request that we've made. It is only a request," he said.
Etoys had sued etoy after hearing from customers who went to the art site by mistake, including some who complained about its profane language. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction against etoy on Nov. 29, threatening the artists with fines of up to $10,000 per day unless they stopped using the domain www.etoy.com.
The group, which mimics corporate behavior for artistic purposes, stopped using the domain name immediately and set up a site in exile using a numeric Internet address. But etoy is well known in Internet art circles and as word of its situation spread, defenders launched protest sites and began blanketing the Internet with e-mail messages. The case has become a cause celebre among those who resent the growing influence of commercial interests on the Internet because they fear it will limit artistic expression.
Ross said the offer from eToys was prompted because "we received a lot of heartfelt, well-reasoned e-mails from the [online] community. It was never our intention to silence artistic expression."
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