On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Paul Singh wrote:
> While that may be true (as with many publications), I hope you're not
> denying the facts of this case
The basic facts are correct: eToys received complaints from parents about
the content their children found on the etoy.com site and, after failing
to reach an agreement with the site's operators, filed a lawsuit involving
trademarks which led to etoy being ordered to shut down their site by a
judge.
Slashdot's coverage ignored or underreported some aspects of the situation
(the motivation behind the lawsuit, epxloitation of the name confusion on
the part of etoy), and reported some conjecture and pure flights of fancy
as fact (evil intentions, scheming lawyers). You have no idea how painful
it is to read things like that from a source that you trust and consider
part of your community. I guess I should have known better though:
Slashdot is an op/ed site. If you want the news, you still have to read
the New York Times (who had much more accurate coverage of the events).
Anyway, I don't claim that eToys was right to take legal action, just that
the reports about an evil empire were greatly exaggerated and that eToys
is a good place to work, full of good people. Anyone who doesn't believe
me at this point probably never will, so I'm going to stop spamming the
list about this subject and go back to spamming about mod_perl.
- Perrin
