eToys wins game

We at WTO/GATT are happy that the behemoth, eToys, has seen fit to temporarily pull its lawyers off the blood-scent of etoy.com, and to allow the art site to continue for a while with its existence. After telling the public for weeks that etoy.com was trying to blemish the wholesome eToys image, eToys is now forced to lie to the press that its "intent was never to silence free artistic expression." We are happy that the torrent of public disgust in all its manifold flavors has forced eToys into this ridiculous public lie.

We are sad, however, that if eToys is in fact relenting--the degree to which they are is still uncertain, and in legal terms is, in fact, nil--its victims are stuck with the enormous fees they have had to pay their lawyers as the financial price for their temporarily extended survival (the other prices are incalculable). These fees are enormous to etoy, but would be trivial to eToys. We are sad that under American law, eToys has no obligation to help etoy.com recover from this unethical, absurd, and completely disgusting attack. etoy, like the thousands of other annual victims of frivolous corporate suits, must recover alone, if it can.

We are sad to be stuck with our rage as onlookers and only, in redress, an assertion by eToys that it is "moving away" from the suit. (They will not say they've dropped it.) We are so sad about this that we hope that eToys' stock value does indeed plummet all the way to zero point zero zero, and we do hope that people continue to attack this wretched entity with every means at their disposal (and there are many more).

We are surely most sad that while this case has scared eToys into momentarily relenting, there are countless other similar cases--some of them equally cruel, some of them crueler, all of them equally flimsy and shamelessly flawed--that will not be dismissed except in court, if the defendants can muster the financial and psychological strength to keep their identities alive.

We can only hope that someday, people will wake up and demand the rescindment of some of the laws protecting the power of these entities, corporations, whose only desire, whose only possible desire, is to profit at any cost whatsoever. Perhaps a good place to start would be that 1886 Supreme Court decision decreeing that corporations are "persons" under the 14th Amendment (which was written to protect the laws of freed slaves). It is thanks to this decision--which legal scholars have since decried as flawed and ridiculous--that corporations are protected under the Bill of Rights as only humans are supposed to be. The 1886 decision, and the host of laws built upon it, give American corporations the rights of free speech, due process, equal protection under the law... and the right to sue anyone they like, whenever they like, in any court in the land.

What can you expect from monsters like eToys, whose only possible interest is in profit, when they are given free rein by a string of terrible laws?