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WIPO Rules Against Sting
FlyingSheep writes "British pop star Sting has lost a case at an international panel to evict the holder of the Internet address sting.com, becoming the first celebrity to suffer such a defeat" This is pretty good news... Words in the dictionary are totally different then, say, JuliaRoberts.com. An interesting stat in the article is that 81% of the WIPO rulings have led to an eviction. Unfortunately the WIPO sided with Microsoft over the Microsof.com domain name: Typo sites should be allowed (and I even get flame mail because of the various Slashdot typo sites!)
Not only that, but the guy who owned corinthians.com had been using it legitimately for years - for something related to the book of Corinthians, which has obviously been around a lot longer than the soccer team.
BTW, in case anyone's curious, the book of Corinthians is a letter written by Paul to the church in Corinth (the Corinthian church).
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Um....must I bring up the issue of Paypai?
A typo-based domain serves absolutely NO purpose other than to snag traffic intended for other pages.
Obviously, this would (in theory) be protected by free speech, it still presents a problem in that, less technical users who decide they want to visit a certain webpage either misspell it, or enter the wrong TLD - bringing them to content that is almost certainly not what they were looking for. (Read: whitehouse.com over whitehouse.gov)
Basically, if the only way these sites have to generate traffic is by using similar domain names to popular sites, one has to wonder if these rip-offs should even exist in the first place.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
'Sting' isn't even his given name. It's a nickname he picked up as a young upstart musician. It'd hardly be fair (as if anything in the WIPO is fair) for them to take away one person's domain because it's the same as a word someone else decided to call themselves.
Next you'd have people changing their legal names just so they could get coveted domain names. Maybe that was Yahoo Serious's plan all along!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
After all, someone's already registered www.gordonsumner.com specifically for the artist currently known as Sting. All he has to do is ask for it. (And, considering the bathtub pic on the sites' splash page, I'd suggest he do it now.)
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I think sting was done wrong by the WIPO. Afterall, a celeberty's name is very important, and misuse of such a thing can be very confusing. I mean, doesn't the WIPO respect Sting's early work in the NWA with the Four Horsemen? This was long before he switched to the WWF due to it's growing popularity. And think about his gothic makeup now. I think he should body slam every arbitrator invloved in this scam. And that whiney guy in that Police band too.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
About three years ago I used to work at a local Israeli ISP, doing customer support. Being a shift supervisor, I had to deal with all the complaints from the customers.
Ones I got a really furious lady. Before I got to say a single word, she started shouting at me: "you should all be ashame of yourself! This is unexceptable! I got little kids here
I tried to calm her down and find out what was the problem, but she kept saying something about email account and mentioning she have little kids there.
After a lot time (working at customer support requires lots of patience, after all
After all, english wasn't her native language
Typo sites just prey on newbies, people who have a hard time spelling, and people who just make honest mistakes. I can just imagine the horrified look on parents' faces when their child gets an educational web site's domain name off by one character and is redirected to a porn site. This type of thing has even been used by competitors: for example, for some time "amazom.com" pointed to a direct competitor to Amazon. And let's not forget all the ways children (and adults) can misspell names like "Pokémon."
Don't penalize people for their inability to spell by giving them a flood of banners, porn, and malicious Javascript. Try misspelling some popular sites' names. You'd be surprised.
For more information, click here.
According to Tolkien Enterprises:
Anyone desiring to use one or more of the Tolkien fanciful names and/or characters in connection with merchandise, stage adaptations, or services offered to the public is requested to submit a written proposal to Laurie Battle, Director of Licensing, 2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.
list of things and events (there are also other lists, one for characters, and one for places).
[...]
Sindarin
Smials
Sting
Stone of Erech
talan
[...]
Or
Sting.com Stings Sting Over Sting Name
"He named himself a verb, present tense! He's not stinging, he's not stung, he's STING!" -Dana Carvey
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Quite right, if you didn't buy it then tough
I was recently in a situation where one of my client's domains was being disputed by a rather large company in New York. The domain was actually their company name but spelled incorrectly (while it correctly spelled my client's company name, it's a situation with using one or two x's). What got me was the attitude on the part of this large company stating "since we have the trademark then we own the domain regardless of whether we, you or anybody has registered it". I find this hard to believe.
my client ended up giving the domain to the large company under threat of lawsuits for over $10,000,000. he basically figured that although he wouldn't lose the case, the hassle involved with getting an attorney and flying to new york would be too much.
I was hoping to see him fight it out for many reasons, the ethics of it and to stick it to big business, but that didn't work out.
Needless to say, anything that went wrong with cable would end up with us getting calls about it. The best part was that the phone had a different ring for off campus calls, so we always knew when it was about cable.
We would answer it "Cable Customer Service", and tell people we would send a truck right out. Nobody ever caught the fact that we didn't ask them where they lived first.
Sometimes we would ask them where they lived, they would tell us, and we would tell them cable was out in that area, and should be back up in under 48 hours. We would then tell them that we wouldn't be charging them anything for their cable service that month.
We never did bill them, so I suppose its all true enough, but we started getting calls from lawyers anyway. We did show the proper respect for the situation, and told them we would stop, while we proceded to give phony help. Being well in debt from student loans can give you an inordinate amount of confidence of your chances in a civil suit.
t
A close-sounding name with a real, legitimate purpose is one thing, but purposely deceiving people is bad. and if they think they are at a site they are not, it can harm the company who is being "typoed"
I had a phone number 1 digit off from USWest when I was in college, and we'd get at least 20 wrong numbers a day. I started answering the phone "hello, this is uswest, how can I assist you" and usually they would buy it. Anyone they asked for, I'd say that they were fired. Not really my fault (I swear) but if I intentionally set up a phone company number for a competing company just 1 digit away so I could take their business, it would be wrong. And it's happened.
________
Are you claiming it is OK for me to sell a cola dirnk in a red bottle, but call it Coka Cola?
This is basic trademark law, and it is (and should be) illegal.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Did he really think he had the sole world-wide rights to this word ?
Serves him right for using such a pretentious name.
In one instance (specifically microsoft.org, case summary) Microsoft won the case in large part because the domain holder failed to respond when contacted by the WIPO arbiters.
People, if you think you've got a right to a domain, defend it! If the possessor of microsoft.org had sought to use it as a "Microsoft sucks" site or something along those lines, he might have had a fighting chance at keeping it! (Of course, it seems that he may have been squatting on the domain, though we don't know since he never answered for himself.)
It's hard to complain about an 81% failure rate when the defendants are doing nothing.
yours,
john
A lot of the fuss about cybersquatters seems to hinge around what is a 'legitimate use' for a domain name.
For example, say I wanted to make a fan-pic site of Julia Roberts (not that i have the time or inclination). That would be a fair use of the name, and I doubt she'd be able to win it back. Things get a bit complicated if I'm only holding the domain for ransom, however.
As I understand it, cybersquatting laws in the US are not applicable to individuals, only to companies. This is, AFAIK, technically the case in the UK too. However, I know one author won her name back recently in court.
The company I work for (One of the biggest European online traders) has been cybersqatted like mad. We are sure that people have set up non-trading companies to stop us being able to get the domains back.
The real issue is of the legal status of domain names. I don't see why they shouldn't be a commodity like, say, number plates. Just because I have a number plate on my car with J R0838TS doesn't mean that Julia Roberts has the right to sue me, or win my plate that I paid for. As long as I'm not pretending I'm Julia Roberts (pretty hard considering....) I'm not doing anything wrong.
Now I know the legal status of domain names is contentious anyway, and the Law is effectivly being written by these rulings. It just seems to me that if you didn't buy it, you shouldn't get it.
yours,
Arieh
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson