<nettime> Dear Toy Corporation

[Soeren Pold <aeksp@mail.hum.au.dk>]

Dear Toy corporation,

This letter is to inform you, that though you are just a toy company, you
are about to do some real damage to the Internet community and Internet
culture! 

Etoy.com, whom you have brought to court in order to steal their domain
name even though they registered it two years before you thought about the
WWW, are a brilliant pioneering net-artist group. With their hijack action
and their other remarkable work, they opened the eyes of millions of
websurfers to the intricacies of the WWW - and how links were controlled
behind the screen. In brilliant ways, Etoy have through their art
demonstrated how the aesthetics and writing of the WWW is developing under
the pressure of heavy commercialisation. In my dissertation written at the
University of Aarhus, I hold Etoy as pioneering webartists, who were some
of the first to investigate into the new writing possibilities of the WWW
back in 1996, when you have not yet become visible on the WWW. 

With your court action you are about to destroy all this. This will not
happen unnoticed, and with this you risk to go down in history as the
company who tried to hinder freedom of speech and publication on the WWW -
not a charming role for a toy corporation! And it will not look nice
either, in the newspaper articles I and others are preparing. But you will
hopefully not succeed but only run a great risk of damaging yourself and
your reputation. 

Sincerely,

A concerned parent and teacher/researcher of multimedia aesthetics and new
media,

Søren Pold


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Soeren Pold
Dept. of Comparative Literature    	phone: +45 8942 1840
University of Aarhus              		fax:    +45 8942 1850
Langelandsgade 139		   	email: aeksp@hum.au.dk (*New domain
name*)
DK-8000  Aarhus C, Denmark         	phone (private) +45 8610 6016
http://www.hum.au.dk/lithist/aeksp/
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