Slashdot Mirror
Man Named "Shell" Loses Domain To Oil Giant
angkor writes: "'A German court has ruled that oil giant Shell has more right to the www.shell.de internet domain name than an individual named Shell who had already registered the name.' It's like the old saying: your name may be McDonald, but you can't open a restaurant named McDonalds ..."
And Shell isn't even German...you'd think they'd look out for their own, at least.
and bodanske.com?
I guess I'm lucky there aren't any large corporations with that name...or maybe it's the corporations that are lucky.
Put identity in the browser.
"It's like the old saying: your name may be McDonald, but you can't open a restaurant named McDonalds ..."
This guy wasn't trying to sell oil or gasoline. He "used shell.de as the homepage for a translation and publicity business."
This just shows just how much more influence big companies have over governments than the rest of us - no matter what government.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
It's like that other old saying:
Whoever has the most money gets the most rights.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
is a very subjective issue
Just how many companies are there called Acme? Several...and they're all in different types of businesses. I don't know how the laws work in Germany, but in the U.S., trademark dilution applies to disputes within the same industry.
If you recall the whole Diablo game dispute, Blizzard had to register the trademark for not only the game but for the movie as well.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
The domain name system is broken. The only way things like this are going to stop is to stop using the domain name system for websites. That's not what it was meant to be used for anyway.
The .us allowing SLD names is just going to make matters worse. The way it stands, people generally use .us names to point to machines, not web sites, and even when they do use them for web sites, it's a fairly non-ambiguous name (serv1.shell.nyc.ny.us). The internet may be free, but big business has taken over the domain name system. If you don't want to play by their rules, get a nice third level domain for free from one of the many places offering them, such as dhs.org, and say the extra 4 characters next time you tell someone your website. Or perhaps even better (until we fix browsers to properly use DNS records), use a web forwarding service. dhs.org has one of those too.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Actually, if my intellectual property memory serves, the McDonald (or MacDonald) clan holds a fair preexisting claim to the "McDonalds" name. There was a small restaurant somewhere in the UK that the fast food chain wanted shut down until the clan suggested they'd better not test the name ownership in court.
But, heck, that could all be a pretty good urban legend.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
Most of the time I try that I get burned and have to go use a search engine anyway.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
These days it seems that in a courtroom a corporation has more rights than an individual. Scary.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
This may be a case of domain squatting
...
... ...
When the Anglo-Dutch oil company tried to register shell.de as its website in May 1996, it discovered the name belonged to a firm that bought famous trade names and sold them on.
On the other hand
"The judge said everyone had the right to a website in their name, regardless of whether it was for business or personal use."
However, this was meaningless if there was such a large gap between two interests claiming the name.
The name Shell was well known, the judge said, and most customers would expect to find the firm's website at shell.de, not that of the individual.
I hate to say it but this does sound as a valid point
Isn't using www.AndreasShell.de or www.FamilyShell.de a fair compromise between the two parties ? This is probably what the judge hopes to accomplish
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Whats the possibility a domain name company would tell them NO, we wont give up the name. Do they have control over the registers to take it and make nameservers forget the domain.?
If they didnt have that much power, some registar could just tell them to kiss off. but i doubt that would be likely
I'd expect to see Shell's website at www.shell.com, but maybe that's just me.
Restaurateur wins right to use `McChina' name for Chinese fast-food chain
/ ne ws/archive/2001/11/27/international1358EST0621.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
In 1995, the Nissan Motor Company noticed that this "Internet" thingy was catching on and they may as well jump on too. Upon attempting to register the obvious domain, they found Uzi had beaten them to it.
Around 2000, the Nissan Motor Company commenced legal proceedings. Read Uzi's story here.
So far, Uzi still has control of the domain name, but for how long remains to be seen.
The moral of this story? Be careful to ensure that when you register your surname as a domain name that it isn't already a business name. Confused yet?
Ever hear of 'Taylor California Cellars' wine, or other Taylor wines? Originally, the name came from a family winery in NY state, but years ago the head of the family sold the name 'Taylor' off to some big conglomerate. Years later, when a grandson of this guy put labels on his own wineries' wine, with 'Walter S. Taylor proprietor' or some such innocuous tag in the small print, the conglomerate sued him! And the courts agreed with the big company, several times.
Since then, Walter just blacks out his name on the labels... "Walter S. ------" (or did... seems Walter S. passed away this year).
Other such cases exist, I'm sure, as does the Nissan, Shell and other examples above.Moral: it might pay to get a serious trademark registered if you really want a domain name, but in the end, if a big company wants it, you're screwed.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
The artice is about someone losing their domain name. If there was suddenly a big corp out there named Alech, they just might snag your name, too.
Dan Quayle was back in politics!
I would love to see him win fights for domains like www.poatatohead.com and the like.
Then, I bet no one would have screwed with him....
In celebration of the upcoming movie....
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
... is a site with a interface paradigm really different from what you usually see in the web. There's be a box into which you typed
your commands -- so you could type any command you wanted instead of having to search around the page
for something to click on. Instead of searching
on the page for a text field, you'd just type somethign like "grep -i product_I_seek amazon.com" or what have you. Instead of one-click shopping, we have one-line shopping: "buy --cust_id=415666 --pin=123456 --item=37002". We'd get things done a lot faster. Maybe this'd become a popular interface method, and we could open source this thing, and people could come up with their own versions. Yeah. Yeah. Also, no one would confuse
it with the oil company site.
(It's late friday night, I'm snowed in, I'm NOT in Costa Rica, I'm upset about it, and so I'm a little punchy)
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
To show my tech savvy-ness, I'll make the following analogy:
Think of it like a cache, its quick to go to company.com - only one page load instead of at least three, one to the search page, one to get results, one to load the page you want. If you're right more than one third of the time, and you probably will be, you get a time benefit. If you're wrong, well, you've got a 33% increase to load this page once, and then can remember the URL for next time. But as long as you're not wrong more than 2/3 of the time, you still see improvement.*
*This of course assumes similar page load times, your milage may vary, but you should get the point.
If not now, when?
What happens when these guys screw with him?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
is that .
What a name to be stuck with!
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
What makes it worse is that he's from Israel.
The only time I never used preview, and the first time a mistake caught me out.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]