[In February 2000 etoy declared "total victory" in their war over the
disputed domain name "etoy.com." After a lawsuit by EToys.com pulled the
plug on the domain name the previous fall, "etoy.com" was put back into
service on 2.12.00 by NSI, restoring email and web service to the
Austrian art group. In late 1999, during the heat of battle, Geri Wittig
recorded the following interview with the etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER. This
interview first appeared in Switch, http://switch.sjsu.edu/.]

Although it may not have reached the media saturation of the millennial
spectacles that unfolded around the world and across our TV screens this
past New Year's Eve, the etoy vs. eToys precedent setting lawsuit
definitely produced a notable display of fireworks across the media
landscape during the final month of 1999. It erupted with particular
intensity across our computer screens - the windows into the cyberspace
that this situation has such potential to impact. Victory was at hand,
on January 25, 2000, when eToys agreed to drop the suit and reimburse
etoy for up to $40,000 in legal fees. etoy, along with the myriad
activists and supporters who took to the TOYWAR battle field
(www.toywar.com), prevailed in the struggle of the rhizomatic,
decentralized Internet community vs. the overwhelming forces of e-
commerce that have taken the net by storm.

+ + +

[etoy.DISCLAIMER: this interview was recorded over a bad TCP/IP
connection in the middle of the night between 01:00 and 04:00 GMT+1
on December 10, 1999 after a six hour meeting with the etoy.LAWYERS
in Switzerland and 12 shots of nitrous oxide. The etoy.PRESS-
SPEAKER accepts no liability for mistakes and sentences that don't
make sense.]

Geri Wittig: etoy's now in its seventh year - any seven year itch?

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: Could you explain this term? I'm not familiar with
this.

GW: I wasn't sure if that was just an American term. It's a term that
especially applies to marriages, but it could really apply to anything.
It's the idea that there's a certain cycle, or a tendency at seven
years, for people to get bored with something and want to move on.

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: We've always had huge changes in the operation.
It's actually difficult to say when the seventh year is. etoy was
founded in October 1994, but there was a pre-history. There was a time
before the official founding, when a few people started to prepare the
operation and started to operate under different names. So it was 1992
when the whole thing started in some capacity, but in 1994 it became
etoy. Of course we've always had changes in the group and in the
concept of etoy, so 1992-1994 was something like a pre-etoy era.
Looking at it in a timeline format, the years from '94 to early '97,
could be called the hijacking period. We did the digital hijack and
also other hijacks. There was the television hijack, when we hijacked a
television show in Switzerland with lots of television viewers. There
were 1.8 million viewers when we hijacked the television show there. We
just jumped on the stage and were talking to the show master about the
Internet. After 10 seconds, the agent who did the hijack left the stage
and the show master was left alone to wonder what had just happened.

After the hijack we had the first sort of crash. We had problems in the
crew because there were different ideas to go on, so there was
something like a crash. At this point we concentrated on our internal
operations. It was during this time period that we started to develop
the database work you were interested in. We developed internal office
structures, in the etoy style, not standard solutions. More like
absurd, very surreal, internal platforms to develop things. And we had
the idea that if we developed a very, very strange, special and
experimental working environment, then this would lead to another
aesthetic and new ideas. Because we are convinced that the environment
you work in is responsible for your output. We invested a lot of time,
energy, and money into these things and a lot of people didn't
understand that. They wanted to see us hijacking forever, because it
was funny. This was a hard time, because we didn't have a lot of
surface. Lots of people were waiting for our next super product and
heist, but we were totally focused on internal strategy. And of course
for a long time we didn't show these things to people - for about a
year. I mean we had one show in Budapest, which was very good, but it
was a preview or very early idea of what we will release in a few days
or weeks, which is called TOYWAR.com. This is a very database oriented
project. It's the domain, which is presently for the resistance. Right
now it's just a platform to allow people to subscribe, so we can
collect addresses and communicate about what's going on. But this will
change as soon as TOYWAR is released. We will release sort of an action
entertainment game, which is a multi-user game. People are part of a
huge battlefield, where they can fight against eToys Inc. People will
have their own character and will have an income - if they work hard
they get etoy.SHARE options. They will also decide what's going on -
what the next step will be, because the shareholders will decide
whether to sell etoy or not.

GW: How long have you been developing this? I mean it seems like you
must have accelerated the development because of everything that's
happened in the past month or so. Were you planning this back in
September when the lawsuit first happened?

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: No, as I told you we started to do something that
was called "protected by etoy" and we released a very early version in
Budapest. We showed it there, but it was a really early test. We had
the show in a gallery and it was a one night event that was organized
like a party. People were invited to the party and at the moment they
entered the gallery, they had to pass a special desk where they had to
log in. They had to leave their names and fingerprints to register. The
whole thing turned into a huge database - the whole party was
represented on a database and we were thinking more of the database
aspect, than what was going on at the party. It was more important for
what was going on on the computers. Every person was represented. There
were screens in the gallery space and projections, so people could see
themselves represented as numbers. They all had a special event number
and they could see them moving in these projections. The interesting
thing was that it was called "protected by etoy" it was a whole absurd
surreal protection situation. People always had to walk in and identify
themselves. If they didn't do that there were alerts and special etoy
agents knew when an alert started, which number hadn't logged in and we
would remove this person from the gallery space. There were people with
cars outside waiting who brought these people to another place - they
were removed. An interesting thing was people had to consume nitrous
oxide and we were following their behavior. It was really interesting.

On the database and the projections you could see how many shots or how
many injections a person had had. We could see which people didn't take
any shots, or which people abused the stuff and got addicted to it. We
had control over a combination of factors. So this was just a test to
see how we could visualize a community or an amount of people doing
something. Of course database stuff is often a little bit boring. So we
usually add something spectacular or dangerous, so people are then
really interested in the information. Because information alone is
often boring, unless you're perhaps an expert who is interested in
statistics, but we found out that people are not usually interested in
that. So we usually try to connect it to some kind of interesting
topic.

This was a show we did in return for our time as artists in residence
at the Center for Culture and Communication in Budapest. It was good as
an interesting research event, but we are more interested in the
Internet, so this was kind of a test area.

GW: And this research fed into TOYWAR.com?

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: The TOYWAR project has some roots in this idea, but
of course it's a totally different story. From a technical side there
are a lot of ideas which we could transfer into the TOYWAR project.
TOYWAR doesn't have a physical presence - it's Internet based, which is
very important because it has allowed for a resistance community from
all over the world to join and subscribe. There are many hundreds of
people subscribing at the moment and they are all located in different
cities.

So yes we started to program and work on this back in '97, but of
course during the last few months we saw that this lawsuit was coming.
It's very difficult because we can never really make any forecasts
because it's always changing. It depends on the court decisions, it
depends on the attorneys, on the enemy's attorneys and it also depends
on our attorneys - we cannot make a forecast for any situation, so it's
very flexible and it's always changing. But we saw that this topic has
the potential for a huge impact, because the whole lawsuit is really a
precedent setting situation.

GW: Right - I was going to ask you about that. Does etoy embrace that
precedent setting situation - in that it's actually possibly a good
thing in terms of your legacy, because you could become part of
something that sets a legal precedent.

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: Yeah - of course that's important. It's a complex
thing. As I mentioned before, it's so complex - the good and the bad
things are also blurring the lines between all these aspects. On one
side it's a real problem - it's a real unfair thing that's going on,
because it's just stupid and ridiculous. And we hope that this will
turn around as we enter another court and find judges who will really
have a look at this situation and they will find out that we really
have priority rights.

GW: How is it that a U.S. court can have jurisdiction over a European
based operation?

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: That's just because the Internet is global and the
office that manages the .com domains is also in the United States. Of
course they tried to stop the whole share thing, but they can't stop it
because we can do it in Europe. But they forbid us from selling shares
in the U.S., especially not in California. But the Internet domain, is
the biggest problem for eToys Inc. - they say we're interfering with
their American trademark. They say it's a violation of trademark law.
That's not true, that's the biggest part here, the most important part,
because also in trademark law we are not wrong. We also have trademark
rights. They came up with another company that they say is older than
we are, but no one can prove it up to this moment and it really looks
like they are just using this argument to destroy us on a financial
level. Because it takes a long time until the situation is that far,
that developed that the courts can really analyze the actual situation,
who was there when and so on. That happens at a later stage and it's
very expensive to get there. They just speculate that we cannot really
survive up to that moment. It's really a strange situation. They also
say they bought this trademark from another company, but they just
bought it this year, so it's really strange.

GW: The next hearing is scheduled for December 27th, which seems very
convenient since it's two days after the Christmas shopping season
ends. What's going to be taking place during that hearing, what's the
next step in the litigation? [This hearing was actually postponed until
January 10, 2000.]

etoy.PRESS-SPEAKER: Right now we are checking, because it's such a bad
thing as you said that they scheduled the next court date between
Christmas and New Year and it's just impossible to get flights for this
date. Of course you can go to L.A., but it would cost us at least $2000
a person to go there. Also all types of holiday obligations are coming
up, so it's the worst date you could set for such a thing when you have
international people involved. What we heard from the last court
hearing was just insane and ridiculous, they just listened to the
attorneys for a short while and then the judge took out a prepared
statement and signed it and that was it. There was no chance to do
anything. The next court date on the 27th, the same judge will be
hearing this. This is really bad, but that's not the end of the story
of course, it's just another thing. There are many articles hitting the
newspapers and the Internet at the moment. There is a huge resistance
community preparing for a fight against them on all types of levels, a
lot of levels that we have no influence over. I mean we definitely
would not hack their system or anything like that. Some people expect
that from us, they say, "hey you can hack them." We definitely wouldn't
do that we are not stupid or na