CD COLLECTORS

To stop — or at least slow — America Online's mass dissemination of free sign-up CDs, Berkeley, Calif., IT pros John Lieberman and Jim McKenna are on a mission: Collect 1 million AOL discs from people all over the world, load them into a truck, drive across the country and dump the entire lot at the company's corporate headquarters in McLean, Va.

“The project was born out of exasperation,” Lieberman said. “We're not out to get AOL. We'd just like to see this particular marketing tactic stopped.”

AOL has never been subtle about recruiting users to its service. Some industry watchers estimate that in one year, the online juggernaut force-feeds mailboxes worldwide with some 300 million free software CDs. So last August, Lieberman, 31, and McKenna, 33, calculated their plan's feasibility, registered the domain name www.nomoreaolcds.com and in two weeks received their first CD. After one month they had 100 discs, and the following month they reached 1000. As word-of-mouth spreads and the campaign gains momentum, the number of CDs has grown exponentially to nearly 15,000.

Lieberman said the reasons for taking on AOL are motivated by nuisance and the environmental impact posed by trashing millions of CDs annually. Despite repeated calls to the company, he still continues to receive discs by the fistful at home. Lieberman's only response to date has been a form letter stating that AOL would gladly remove him from its phone solicitation list — which was never a problem to begin with.

“If someone kept dropping notes off at your house, even after you told them to stop doing it, you'd get annoyed,” he said. “And when you consider that 1 million CDs without packaging weigh about 17 tons, there's a pretty high environmental cost there.”

While Lieberman and McKenna are serious about the goal, they're not so serious that they can't appreciate the humor of the effort. The site is running an unwanted AOL CD haiku contest, and above a portrait of George Washington reads a caption stating, “He wouldn't want 'em either.” The pair have nevertheless drawn international attention to the issue: Volunteers in Germany, France and the U.K. have set up similar Web sites to help solve a problem that they say exists abroad as well.

Although it could take several years to reach 1 million CDs, Lieberman said he and McKenna are patient and plan on seeing their plan through. The two dedicate only a few hours per week to the project, and their out-of-pocket expenses are minimal. The fact that it has never been a moneymaking proposition also makes it easier to take the campaign lightly.

“In the best dotcom spirit, this is a money loser from the get-go,” Lieberman said. “But when we get to a point when we're ready to drive across the country, we certainly wouldn't object if someone wanted to chip in gas money.”