Thus, in 1995, was born Big Miss Moviola. Hundreds of women filmmakers have since swapped tapes of their work through Big Miss Moviola, and July took it online last year at bigmissmoviola.com.

Which is where Magnasync/Moviola Corporation, the original maker of Moviola film-editing tools, found it. Magnasync/Moviola promptly fired off a letter to July, informing her that she was violating the company's trademark.

"If we were to allow everyone and anyone to use the 'Moviola' name, we would lose our rights to the trademark," said Dana Newman, Moviola's corporate counsel. Legally, Newman has a valid point -- companies are required by law to police their trademarks.

Unfortunately for Magnasync/Moviola, July promptly contacted RTMark, the anti-corporate activist group that led the online assault against eToys.com last winter after the company sued the online art collective etoy.

And RTMark doesn't particularly care if Moviola's point is legally valid or not; the assault on Big Miss Moviola is at least ethically invalid, RTMark said, and it therefore decided to unleash its online fury against Magnasync/Moviola and its parent company, J&R Film Co.

The plan was to launch a coordinated email assault on Moviola.com -- a "virtual sit-in" of thousands of email protestors -- "likely to cripple the Moviola servers even better than it did those of eToys," according to a message from RTMark to its mailing list recipients. "Of course, we are also working out other strategies more specific to this company's interests."

RTMark has already sent protest emails to every employee at Moviola. It also circulated a list of Moviola email addresses, urging supporters to send their own protests.

"Big Miss Moviola is empowering girls, and to harm that activity in the name of the 'potential' to have commercial damage is morally bankrupt," said an RTMark organizer who uses the alias Frank Guerrero. "That's not a legal opinion, its just common sense and ethics, which sometimes have little to do with the law."

Moviola, meanwhile, was asking, "Why me?" It pointed out that dozens and dozens of companies police the Web for trademark violations.

"We're being bombarded with email now, but there's a lot of misinformation floating around out there. The comparison is the eToys/etoy case, but this is totally different, because we've owned the trademark since 1965." The art collective etoy, sued by eToys.com for trademark infringement, existed before the toy-seller came online.