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Aimster Loses Domain to AOL
mduell writes "The National Arbitration Forum (NAF) decided that the "AIM" in Aimster violates America Online's trademark and that Aimster must relinquish several Internet domain names with "AIM" in them to AOL." Just another in a long series of cases that prove that if you have a trademark, you have the right to any domain name that contains those letters in that order. I don't like it any more then you do.
Aimster was named after AIM because it incorporates your AOL Instant Messenger buddy list. This is a pretty clear use of a trademarked term, and it *is* trying to indicate that they're related.
AOL is completely whithin their rights, and if they didn't defend themselves than they could easily lose the ability to defend themselves in the future.
The real news story is that the otherwise legally on-top-of-it Aimster team let this slip.
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Here's a "what if?" :
/etc/resolv.conf.
:-)
What if everyone out there who thinks large corporations stealing others' domain names is crap, and who runs a nameserver, decides to tell AOL to piss off, and put in DNS pointers to aimster's site for www.aimster.com anyway? There's no law that says I *have* to listen to the root nameservers.
Then, anyone who wanted to see the uncorporatized Internet could just stick on of these namservers in their
Couldn't we use OpenNIC to do something like this?
Yeah, I know, it's far to idealistic to think enough people would do this for it to actually work, but I find it a neat idea in theory anyway.
-Wintermute
Well "AIM" is the full acronym of their software, so you'd probably have to have a full Windows title, like "windows95" or "windowsxp". However this does mean that if I were to create a domain called "windowsxpfixes.com" that had a list of tweaks or fixes to Windows XP (assuming of course it doesn't run perfectly out of the box) that MS could snatch my domain.
That sounds pretty scary. It might even mean that if I created a domain called "xpenhancer.com" to sell a multiple-desktop tool for Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft could legally take the domain away.
Note that nothing here says that Aimster claimed to be made by the same people who made AOL Instant Messenger. The mere fact that the name incoporated the name of related software was enough.
This ruling could have huge ranging implications. Think of how many computer fan websites there are out there that use the name of the product in them. www.matroxusers.com, www.amdzone.com, www.voodooextreme.com, www.geforcefaq.com... Since these are normally fan sites it's in the best interest of the companies with the related trademarks to ket the fans express themselves, but what if company XXX comes out with a crappy product and XXXtweak.com trashes it in a review?
This is pretty scary stuff. In the past it seems to me that most of the domain names taken from someone were non-commercial ones that often were squatting on the name. But now what can you do? If you have a domain name that insults a company, they can take it. If you make a product designed for use with another product they can take your name. If you don't make a product at all and you're careless they can take it. Who is safe? I can see it in the news tomorrow:
And of course we all know that (as they actually argued in court) the chain restaurant Hooters refers to the sound made by their owl mascot.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I worked at aimster for a few months before deciding they weren't going anywhere (read: yes, i know why it's named what it's named). The reason for "AIM"ster is that you were "AIM"ing for only your buddies. Any semblance to AOL's product offering is entirely coincidental. The fact that aimster (supposedly) integrates with IM products is a happy side note as well.
In the case that you weren't aware, aimster is a p2p app that was supposedly designed to integrate well with IM infrastructure (i say supposedly because, well, i know how the previous version worked =), and allow you to only share files with your buddies. The versions i worked on were rather lackluster, and the file sharing didn't work for most people most of the time. I can't speak for the new version, as it was released after i left the company.
Much as i dislike aimster, i think johnny had a good idea, and he was willing to support me to do the reverse engineering of AIM's OFT (AIM File Transfer) in an open manner. We have a partial implementation of it in libfaim, but nobody really cares enough to finish it up.
You know, you guys don't have any right to complain about the spreading of FUD when you do it so often yourselves. AOL wouldn't have any right to the domain www.aimtokill.com as long as nobody was offering instant-messenger stuff there. You know that.
I agree that this is stupid, as long as Aimster has notices in reasonably conspicuous places to the effect that they are not affiliated with AOL, they should get to keep the domains. The name Aimster is not meant to confuse people into thinking its an officially AOL-endorsed product but its a clever (well, maybe not that clever) play on words that both lets people know its a file-sharing service and that it works with AIM.
However, just because this case is stupid doesn't give you the right to spread FUD, so keep quiet!
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