For too long, many reporters have ascribed the responsibility for saving etoy.com either to ®TMark or, more recently, to Toywar.com. Such increasingly wild misreporting cheapens this important victory, and makes it much less useful as a lesson to others.
We hope that the revised timeline below--showing some new information, and with ®TMark's participation in italics and Toywar.com's participation in bold--will show the unimportance of ®TMark's and Toywar.com's roles, and instead give thanks where thanks are due.
Indeed, the only important role in the fight against eToys was played by the countless activists who, with little or no coordination, flooded eToys investment boards until many dropped their stock, bombarded eToys.com until CNN reported it down, wrote countless e-mails to reporters, eToys employees, and anyone else who would listen, and finally achieved, for etoy and for everyone, the most significant victory of art over commerce in Internet history.
The role of ®TMark, which stepped into the fray a full two weeks after the protests began, was only that of publicist and sometime facilitator. And Toywar.com, brilliant as it is, only became functional after the battle against eToys had already been fully won, with only one formality missing.
What brought victory was not ®TMark or Toywar.com, but rather (1) the widespread recognition that eToys was waging a war not just against etoy.com but against free expression, (2) the cleverness of half a dozen key figures in hatching plan after plan after plan, and (3) a tool already at everyone's disposal: the Internet.
To write that etoy was saved by an activist website like ®TMark, or by a sophisticated piece of computer code and graphics like Toywar.com, not only slights the countless people who actually did the saving, but leaves a much less empowering tale for those who will fight in the future.
®TMark participation is shown in italics; Toywar.com participation is shown in bold;
most text items are linked to the relevant articles. This chart was
inspired by etoy and RT Thompson, and is intended for illustrational purposes only, not to imply a simple causality. There are many factors in the decline of eToys stock, of which the etoy protests were only some.
