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 ..."
"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.
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?
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.
I don't know Germany either, but:
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.
You're talking about a different trademark law. Perhaps the mark used by Blizzard was not "famous", or perhaps the lawyers just screwed them over by giving them bad advice to make more money. Under the FTDA of 1995, you don't even have to register your trademark at all.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I think you'd be utterly amazed. Anyone I know that isn't deeply computer savvy does just that. And heaven help them if it points to a different company. ``I didn't know that foo.com did contract assassination, too! I thought they were just a bakery!''.
And really, sometimes the search engine doesn't help, either. Until I saw multiple people do it, I always thought people inputting company.com into an engine's search field was just a joke. And then they get confused again. ``Looking for Foo Baking online doesn't work. I put foo.com into Google, and it only brought up links to foo.com, and at the store they told me it was foo-bakers.com.''
-- My work here is done. If you need me again, just admit to yourself that you're screwed, and die.
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
Nah, given that Shell is a big company any German sites should be in *.de.shell.com. :)
Or for webpages relegated to http://www.shell.com/germany/
Isn't that what really happens IRL?
Link.
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.
... 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.