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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 IN THE MAGAZINE'S LAWSUIT AGAINST TERRI WELLES, YOU'LL FIND TWO COMPETING VISIONS OF THE WEB. - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | This column is about a dispute between centerfold model Terri Welles and her former patrons at Playboy, who chose her as Playmate of the Year back in 1981 and are now suing her for using the words "Playboy" and "Playmate" on her own Web site at Terriwelles.com. Playboy's lawyers told the New York Times that Welles is violating its trademark and "hijacking Playboy's customers" by mentioning those words -- both on her pages and in the "meta tags" embedded in their coding that help some search sites catalog Web pages. Last week Welles won a round of the legal battle, but Playboy has promised to pursue its case in federal appeals court. Simply by stating these facts in the previous paragraph, of course, I have now mentioned the word "Playboy" five times (and this sentence makes six). When we write our meta tags for this page we'll put "Playboy" and "Playmate" in there, too, since those keywords fairly describe this article's content. So if Playboy's lawyers are right, I'm now violating their rights and hijacking their customers, too. So is every other news outfit that chose to post its coverage of this dispute on the Web. Come to think of it, if I should want to post to my personal Web site an essay about J.M. Synge's classic Irish drama "The Playboy of the Western World," it looks like I'm going to need counsel. This is not an exaggeration, a reductio ad absurdum of Playboy's argument. Playboy doesn't dispute the truth of Welles' self-description as a former Playmate; it just doesn't like her using the Web to tell the world that fact. It claims absolute ownership of the words "Playboy" and "Playmate." Welles isn't deceiving anyone -- unlike in a case last year, in which Playboy prevailed against a Hong Kong-based porn purveyor that had registered domains like "playboyxxx.com" and filled its pages' meta tags with multiple references to "Playboy" and its various permutations. By comparison, Welles' approach to Web marketing is scrupulous; in fact, it looks positively demure amid the usual shenanigans of X-rated sites. Her site's meta tag keyword list ("terri, welles, playmate, playboy, model, models, semi-nudity, naked, breast, breasts, tit, tits, nipple, nipples, ass, butt") pales next to most porn sites' meta tags, which typically -- in a practice known as "spamdexing" -- contain vast lexicons of synonyms for sex organs and acts in every possible permutation. (It's easy to view any site's meta tags using a Web browser's "View source" command.) Some observers of the case have suggested that there's a fundamental difference between simply publishing a word like "Playboy" on a Web page and placing it in a hidden meta tag, which only affects a site's placement in search-engine catalogs. But that argument doesn't jibe with reality: Meta tags aren't a universal system -- some search sites use them, some don't. What does get universally indexed is the text on Web pages. In other words, even Welles' effort to steer clear of legal trouble by publishing a disclaimer at the foot of her home page reading "This site is neither endorsed, nor sponsored by, nor affiliated with Playboy Enterprises, Inc." could cause her page to turn up on a search for "Playboy." - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T__P A G E .|. Looking for Playboy in all the wrong places