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December 17, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TOY WAR HEATS UP
Press conference at Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., New York, 6:30pm.
Free and open to the public.
Contact: mailto:etoyconference@rtmark.com
(646)228-8822 (Friday 12/18 to Monday 12/20 only)
More information: http://rtmark.com/etoy/
http://rtmark.com/etoypress.html
On November 29, freedom on the Internet suffered a potentially devastating
blow when the e-commerce toy giant eToys was granted a court injunction
against the European online art collective etoy (no "s"), forcing the much
longer-established artists to stop using their domain name, etoy.com, which
predates eToys' existence by two years. (Most recently, Network Solutions,
the company that maintains the master list of internet addresses (domains)
has blocked email service to etoy.com, though this was not mandated by the
injunction.)
On December 12, RTMark, an online activist group, announced an initiative
aimed at raising public awareness of the situation. With a new series of
on-line activities organized in a "mutual fund" structure
(http://rtmark.com/etoy/), RTMark is helping to create a precedent that will
show corporations that they cannot abuse the law on the Internet with
impunity, much as the Internet-driven Brent Spar fiasco forced Shell and
other petroleum companies to consider environmental impact before undertaking
potentially destructive operations (http://rtmark.com/shell).
The "etoy Fund" and other anti-eToys campaigns have been so successful that
the 40% drop in eToys' share price which began on November 29, the day
of the injunction, has been widely attributed to the protests and to fear
of their results. The campaign will continue and intensify during the last-
minute Christmas shopping rush.
The activities in the "etoy Fund" range from direct hacking and Denial of
Service (DoS) attacks against eToys.com, to information campaigns directed at
eToys investors on ETYS Internet message boards, to traditional boycotts and
pickets. Several of the projects have already been a demonstrable success;
perhaps most visibly, the "Virtual Sit-in" (http://rtmark.com/sitin.html), a
sophisticated DoS attack in which tens of thousands have participated, has
rendered the eToys servers uselessly sluggish at times. (The RAND Corporation
warned eToys this could happen, apparently to no avail; see
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/19991215/1754367s.htm.)
Confirmed speakers and participants in Monday's press conference include etoy
spokespeople, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (developers of the Virtual
Sit-in software), Fakeshop (designers of the Virtual Sit-in pages),
spokespeople for other embattled domains (http://rtmark.com/etoyother.html),
Santas Against eToys (we expect about twenty), The Hungry March Band,
Reverend Billy, the computer buyer's advice columnist for iVillage.com, and
Internet advisory Rhizome. Question-and-answer periods will follow each
speaker.
BACKGROUND
eToys is the third largest e-business on the Internet; etoy.com, which eToys
lawyers have shut down, is the domain synonymous with the oldest, best-known,
and most influential Internet art group, etoy. etoy has owned etoy.com since
1995, before eToys existed, and two years before eToys registered its own URL.
etoy.com has never made any reference to eToys. See
http://rtmark.com/etoypress.html for more information.
RTMark, which is in no way associated with etoy, aims to publicize the
widespread corporate abuse of democratic institutions like courts and
elections. To this end it solicits and distributes funding for "sabotage
projects"; the groups of such projects are called "mutual funds" in order to
call attention to one way in which large numbers of people come to identify
corporate needs as their own. RTMark projects do not normally target specific
companies; the etoy Fund projects are an exception.
RTMark is no stranger to the hot topic of domain-name control. The World
Trade Organization's press release about http://gatt.org, accusing RTMark of
"illegal practices" in publishing information critical of the WTO at that
site, merely brought the WTO ridicule from the press
(http://rtmark.com/gatt.html); George W. Bush's and Microsoft's legal attacks
on GWBush.com (http://rtmark.com/bush.html) and MicrosoftEdu.com
(http://rtmark.com/allpress.html#mse) failed to affect the domains. See also
http://rtmark.com/othersites.html for more on this issue.
# 30 #
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