LITIGIOUS CULTURE.

BACK WHEN I LIVED IN RIO DE JANEIRO, I OFTEN HEARD frustrated Cariocas lamenting over the city's "bagunca"--mess--of crime, corruption and everyday chaos. This would usually be followed by rueful praise of the United States as an organized society with effective laws.

These Yankee-philes hadn't yet discovered the "bagunca" of U.S. cyberspace, where the "nation of laws" has become snarled in Internet lawsuits over patent, trademark and trade-secret infringement and unfair competition.

Yet they may soon come to know it first hand according to several harbingers I've noticed.

Many of the U.S. lawsuits involve cybersquatters--people who use trademarks or words similar to existing trademarks to draw traffic to their own sites or to make big bucks by selling them to their natural owners. While it costs US$70 to register a domain name, some addresses can later fetch many times more than that.

Last year's trademark lawsuits involved Volkswagen of America vs. Virtual Works, a Virginia-based service provider that used VW in its domain name; Walt Disney Company vs. Dosney.com, a porno site, and AT&T vs. an online phone card seller called attphonecard.com. In one of the stranger disputes, America Online demanded author Marlene Sobol stop selling her Internet dating book entitled "You've Got Male" because the title sounded too much like its catch phrase "You've Got Mail."

And then there's the stuff that would really make Latin Americans mutter "crazy gringos."

A group called Seven Words has sued the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers--the non-profit group tapped by the Clinton Administration to oversee the Internet's naming system--to allow them to register the so-called seven dirty words made popular in a George Carlin comedy sketch as domain names.

The NAACP and Anti-Defamation League have registered several racial and anti-Semitic slurs to keep hate groups from using them in Internet addresses. Last December, an unnamed seller on the eBay auction site tried to peddle the rights to the "n-word" for a minimum bid of $1 million!

Then there are the folks who designed the website www.etoys-sucks.com after the web toy company won a court order preventing the Swiss art site etoy from using its long-standing domain name.

Until now, Latin America Internet executives have mostly stayed clear of U.S.-style Internet squabbles and poor taste. "Lawsuits are not part of our business culture," says Luis Anavitarte, a Peruvian who heads the Latin America and Caribbean division for the Silicon Valley think tank Dataquest.

Still, there are signs in the region that unbridled cybersquatting, vulgar domain names and lawsuits could be just around the corner.

A-site-called www.elatinamerica.com is selling off such domain names as preciosbajos.com, elatin.com and ehis-panic.com to the highest bidder. An English-language porn site uses the web address www.puta.com, and a small Internet concern called Curitiba America has filed one of Brazil's first lawsuits over trademarks and web addresses. It has taken on no less a foe than America Online, keeping the web giant from using the domain name www.aol.com.br.

Culture or not, Anavitarte believes the region's web companies are indeed headed down a litigious road and that the World Trade Organization (WTO) will eventually be forced to define rules as individual governments sit on their hands. If he's right, it could be the only way to stop a begunca similar to that now seen in the "nation of laws."