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A L S O__T O D A Y Results of Challenge No. 8 By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Phony Microsoft support letters T A B L E__T A L K Netscape vs. Internet Explorer: The battle of the browsers continues in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Starship trouper By Janelle Brown Douglas Adams' new "Titanic" game is just the tip of a multimedia iceberg (04/30/98) Getting MUDdy with Xena and Hercules By Moira Muldoon A new online game lets fans of the TV shows explore their textual fantasies (04/30/98) Revenge of the early adopters By Andrew Leonard Angry DVD owners didn't like a new video-rental technology -- so they fought back on the Net (04/29/98) Betrayed! By Evan Marx A writer's engagement unravels -- thanks to a telltale e-mail message (04/28/98) Epistolary romance, digital style By Jenn Shreve E-mail has changed how we start relationships, how we keep them going -- and how we wreck them (04/27/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

PLAYBOY AND PLAYMATE PLAY A GAME OF META TAG | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Of course, virtually anyone's page could turn up on a search for "Playboy." Faced with the sheer vastness of the ever-changing Web, the search sites long ago became semi-useless when hunting for any keyword that's in heavy circulation -- like Playboy, Microsoft or Clinton. Go to, say, Excite and type in "Playboy": At the top of the list of 46,199 sites you receive you'll find "Best of Pamela Anderson," a site creatively named "Sluts-r-us," somebody's "Playboy Trading Card Showcase" and other oddities, all before the actual Playboy site turns up on the list. By now, anyone seeking the actual Playboy site knows to just try "www.playboy.com" -- and, if that fails, use a real, hand-tooled Web guide like Yahoo. I'd have thought all this would be obvious to anyone who works in the Web business today. But to my surprise, last week on a ZDTV talk show I got into an argument with a Silicon Valley exec, who adamantly sided with Playboy and felt that Welles was simply stealing Playboy's business. The real conflict here -- and one that no single court decision can resolve -- is between competing visions of the Web. If you think the Web is simply a "marketspace," a big mall where companies compete for "brand identity" and "mindshare," then Playboy's trademark protection makes sense. While many large corporations have sunk piles of money into making this vision of the Web a reality, vast numbers of individual people are busy pursuing a different vision -- one in which the Web is a giant communications network in which we find one another based on a shared interest, be it bottle-top collecting, Proust or Playboy Playmates. In the latter vision, any company that tries to clamp down on use of its name is also going to stifle any chance of building an enthusiastic following across the Web. Playboy, with its history as the granddaddy of pinup magazines, is obviously less interested in exploiting the Web's potential for building new kinds of relationships than in simply protecting the gold mine of its existing brand. But any precedents Playboy might establish in court would apply across the board and could seriously harm the Web's usefulness to everyone. Even if Playboy isn't your cup of tea, there's cause for concern. Say your kid loves Lego and puts up a Web page devoted to the subject. Do you want to worry about the toy company's lawyers suing Junior for trademark infringement? Welles told News.com that she thinks Playboy went after her because the company wanted all of its former Playmates to build their sites under the Playboy umbrella, rather than strike out on their entrepreneurial own, as she did. That seems at least plausible, since there are hundreds of other Web sites out there with "playboy" meta tags that haven't been targeted. In any case, what Playboy has achieved, mostly, is to give Welles a lot of free publicity for her site. The high-volume, high-competition world of porn sites is, as we've reported here before, precisely where the future of Web marketing is getting hammered out. So far in the Welles case, the courts have sensibly ruled that the principle of "fair use" can apply to meta tags and Web navigation tools as well as Web content. But Playboy can afford lots of lawyers and appeals, and there's no guarantee that its proprietary approach to words on the Web won't prevail. And if the law ends up treating the Web as one big business directory, then we shouldn't be surprised if the medium ends up becoming as scintillating as a volume of the Yellow Pages. SALON | May 1, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - E-mail Scott Rosenberg.