Slashdot Mirror

It's happening already. Check out this forum on a Purdue student messageboard. This idiot is plugging some sort of notetaking software.

Don't forget the purdueonline.com book exchange --- they run slashcode!

Who do these people think they are? Apparently, if you have money, you can try and take over any domain name that you please. For another excellent example of this, take a look here on how the cops and some rich dude are suing a college student to make him fork over his domain drunkatcollege.com

I started an online community for Purdue University students in late 1997. Going on our fifth year, I'm frequently asked if I would do it all again. I'd like to think not. Using slashcode has certainly allowed me to focus time and money elsewhere. Our target audience is small, operating budget non-existent with page views in the 300 thousands per month. When the board of trustees wants your domain, it's tempting to just give up at times. The $5 in advertising revenue certainly doesn't make up for the bandwidth. So, would I do it again? I'm a geek, enough said.

Unfortunately our school cut RESNET from Internet2 access.

Partly, I'd assume, these features help people feel comfortable leaving their dorm rooms. But also, these features are expensive to setup for only a semester or two, so the management sets them up in bulk (i.e. cheaper) and uses it as a marketing tool.

The general setup is an Ethernet drop in every room, along with cable, phone, and panic alarms.

While some of these apartments are strictly local to Purdue, some companies are even doing this similar community complex idea at several campuses across the country.

Excellent point! I believe in using the right tools for the job. A comment posted here read "96% of the top 50 e-commerce sites use Oracle." Sure, if your website is handling customer orders and money you better use a RDBMS that supports commit/rollback, strong data integrity, etc.. However, we must remember the percentage of real time data driven sites using Oracle is FAR LESS. Thousands of sucessful websites depend on MySQL, and have been running flawlessy for years. Would I develop an e-commerce site using MySQL, the obvious answer is no. Would use it to organize my favorite drinks online? Yes!

just my 2 cents.

Domain name squatting was once regarded as completely appropriate...

1. Who says that ttyp0 is cybersquatting? According to his article, the website is offering services of a valid nature to Purdue students.
2. He's not attempting to sell the domain name and make money on it, and finally,
3. I disagree that domain name squatting was ever regarded as completely appropriate, even "four to five years ago or something like that"

The second part of your post implies that anything to do with the word Compaq (for example) is trademarked, which may or may not be true. However, ttyp0 checked, and clearly states not only that "I found that Purdue had only two names trademarked, which are "Purdue University" and "Purdue Boilermakers"." but also that "I clearly state that we are not affiliated with Purdue University."So on this point, again, the website owner has made efforts to completely obey the law.

This leads to my final dissection of your post, in which you say "...something about trademark law says that if you don't protect your trademark, you lose the right to it, i.e. you can't successfully sue people later on that use it." That is correct. Except that the name Purdue isn't trademarked, just "Purdue University" and "Purdue Boilermakers. Which means that your final point ("They can sue you even if you registered it "first", because it was illegal of you to register and use their name in the first place.") doesn't hold up to reality.

The bottom line is, if the University wanted the word "Purdue" trademarked, they should have done it years ago. Since they didn't, they don't have the legal right to challenge PURDUEONLINE.COM's right to exist.