The plaintiff was a corporation, based ten miles away in Santa Monica. The firm was personified by the character of its founder, Chief Executive Officer and archly self-described Uncle of the Board, Toby Lenk. This bald, slouch-shouldered thirty-eight-year-old had a fondness for mimicry and silly voices, and such a passion for work that at the time of the hearing he had gone for three years without taking the time off even to buy himself a pair of shoes. He had built his corporation -- a toy shop -- in less than a thousand days, with the dream to make life easier for parents all over the world. Like a fairytale come true, it was now worth $8 billion, and a darling of Wall Street. Considered to be amongst the best companies of its kind Lenk had filled it with only the smartest people, who between them could pack a trophy cabinet with their business diplomas from some of the world's most prestigious universities. It was the Monday morning after a gang-busting Thanksgiving weekend during which Lenk's toy shop had sold record numbers of Barbie Dolls and Star Wars figures. Toby Lenk, it seemed, could do no wrong. The powerful global brand that he could proudly call his own was eToys The defendants were a little trickier to pin down. Indeed, the toy company's lawyers had failed to serve these renegades with all the necessary papers. They were supposed to be at large somewhere in Europe. At the time of the hearing one of them, agent.ZAI, was in the dank basement of a scruffy townhouse in a run-down neighbourhood in Zürich, Switzerland, eagerly awaiting news Physically as well as materially, the opponents were worlds apart. They were never to meet Zai was then a slim, diminutive, brown-haired twenty-eight-year-old who over time had nurtured his growing reputation in the arcane world of digital art. For five years he had meticulously constructed an art project that satirised the dot-com frenzy. Even before Lenk's toy shop sold its first Mr Potato Head, Zai had described himself as the Chief Executive Officer of a group called etoy and behaved as if he was the leader of a global corporation. But in reality etoy had no employees and little corporate infrastructure. It did have a logo, a brand and a web-site and it sold a series of graphic posters that its members called `shares'. There was some seriousness to this apparently comic endeavour; it held up an intriguing mirror, as only art could, to a corporate and financial world that was being seduced by its own cheerleading. The etoy vision had been lent credibility and support beyond that received from the art world -- even Austria's Chancellor Viktor Klima had bought shares The legal suit filed by eToys in the Los Angeles Superior Court attacked the entire edifice of etoy's ludicrous `corporate' venture -- its brand, trademark and greatest achievements -- in a desperate attempt to shut down the artists' web-site. Absurdly, the world's most valuable toy shop had launched the explosive litigation against the chimera, accusing etoy of `unfair competition' Neither Toby Lenk nor Zai made it to the courthouse. Lenk was busy finalising a deal to raise a further $150 million from his investors. Zai had not managed to get a flight to Los Angeles from Zürich over the busy Thanksgiving weekend. In any case, he had been advised that were he to step foot in America he might be arrested for securities fraud, one of the most severe crimes against global capitalism The details of how etoy and eToys built their respective companies and brands gives a fascinating insight into the history of the Internet as it travelled from free, academic resource to a platform for global commerce. On one hand was a new and fragile corporation that Wall Street pushed into the clouds. There eToys perfectly surfed a wave of euphoria about business and the capital markets, inspiring almost devotional loyalty as it created extraordinary wealth for its investors and employees. etoy, on the other hand, was a conceptual-art project that brilliantly summed up the times. It inspired a community of hackers, activists and artists to launch an enormous campaign. They personified an alternative vision of the Internet, anarchistic, altruistic and uneasy at the network^(1)s colonisation by corporations. Both parties had spent years skilfully positioning themselves to benefit from the Internet goldrush. Now their values -- monetary and moral -- were clashing The conflict not only expressed the divides and fissures that had developed since the formation of the Internet, it also turned on an altogether larger dispute, concerning the very identity of the Internet. The reason for this acrimonious spat started over a single, 250-line document now kept in a guarded, bomb-proof room in Herndon, Virginia. It holds the key to the map of the Internet itself, through which domain names -- Internet addresses like amazon.com or harpercollins.com -- are controlled. The consequences of the domain battle were to play a central and decisive role in the Los Angeles courtroom By 10.30 a.m., Judge John P. Shook had stated his judgement. The battle began.
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First Chapter Online at The Guardian
Prologue
At 8.30 a.m. on 29 November 1999, seven lawyers arrived for a hearing on the fifth floor of the Los Angeles County Courthouse. They waited at the back of Department 53, a small, wood-panelled courtroom, for the judge to call the hearing to order. In preparation for this day, these lawyers had spent months submitting hundreds of pages of evidence and arguments to the court. Those on one team had determinedly manoeuvred to prevent the hearing taking place at all; those on the other had offered increasing amounts of cash for a speedy resolution of the case. Now their arguments were to be heard in open court.
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