Toying with Domain Names
by Steve Kettmann
3:00 a.m. 11.Dec.1999 PST
BERLIN -- The corporation-mocking Internet artists behind Swiss-based etoy can feel the groundswell of support welling up behind them in their dramatic court battle with the Rock & Roll Elmo-pushers at etoys.com.
It's a fight that should have Net-conscious people at least as fired up as the mobs in Seattle were last week, since it could define the rules of engagement between corporations and creative types for years to come. The central question: Can a US court presume to regulate the wide-open international landscape of Internet art?
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"It's insane," said an etoy agent calling himself Zai, from the group's headquarters in Zurich. "It's all about money, and they are just looking for a way to hurt us. They can do that in Los Angeles. I'm not sure they could do that in San Francisco.... We definitely told them that we won't sell the etoy domain to them at this point. We need it for our work, and we built it."
As it stands, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has issued a temporary injunction against the puckish provocateurs of etoy, denying
them the use of the www.etoy.com domain. This, despite the fact they were using it years before the corporate types at www.etoys.com ever whipped up an US$8 billion business out of thin air.
Etoys.com, of course, casts the issue primarily as one of would-be
customers being confused and ending up cruising around the etoy.com site when they could be at etoys.com instead, adding K'NEX robots or Donkey Kong 2.3 billion to their "shopping carts."
"This is in no way, shape, or form an attempt on our part to say what is and what is not art," said Ken Ross, etoys' vice president of communications. "We absolutely respect their freedom and their points of view."
"There was profanity, there were sadomasochistic images, there were images of terrorist activity. That's upsetting to many people. That's not a comment on whether it has artistic merit. It's about our responsibility to our customers, and our responsibility to address what was beginning to be confusion in the marketplace. Obviously, we also took into account that one of the stated intents of etoy is to disrupt business."
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