Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Chip Rosenthal Wins Unicom Domain Name Case

Posted by Hemos on from the follow-up-with-win dept.

Seth Schoen writes "As seen last month, Chip Rosenthal (whom many people know for Reply-to Munging Considered Harmful, among other projects) was threatened with the loss of his domain name unicom.com. He's now won in court and will get to keep the domain, at least for the time being."

5 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Leave him alone... by PoiBoy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Since he registered this domain way back in 1990, I don't see how this California company has any claim to it. Notice that the company became interested in acquiring the domain around 1998, about the time every company on the planet decided to get online. Seeing that an individual owned the name they wanted, they figured they could throw a few lawyers at the problem and scare the person into giving it up. They thought wrongly.

    Sure, cybersquatting just to extort money out of a company or to otherwise do harm to a company is wrong; in these situations I think companies have legitimate beef with cybersquatters. However, let's not ignore that fact that this guy registered the domain in 1990!

    --
    Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
  2. Cyber squatters by sweat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have never been a fan of companies being able to override people who own domain names. First come, First serve should apply. Especially if the domain name was originally purchased before the company was even formed. A similar example was the newish Minnesota Wild NHL team sued a childrens magazine(titled Wild) even though the magazine was around for years before the team even existed. Crazy.

  3. A rare bit of sanity by sjhwilkes · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Companies should be checking domain name availability before coming up with names, either that or develop a more relaxed attitude to all the different TLD's. - I worked for too many firms that consider 300 odd names their right.

  4. The thing.. by Heem · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The thing that bothers me the most about this is how much time and money it cost Chip just to defend himself. How many of us have those resources? If someone came after one of my domains, I'd fight as much as I could on my own, but in the end would probably be forced to give up. Thats what these corporate types want. they have the money and the resources to do this. There needs to be a law to protect US from this behavior.

    --
    Don't Tread on Me
  5. Re:He didn't REALLY win--jurisdictional issues by chip+rosenthal · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I agree with your analysis. However it greatly rearranges the playing field, and that helps me tremendously. I won't have to fight a long-distance lawsuit. If they choose to re-file, they would have to retain ($$$$) Texas counsel. (I believe all of their work on the lawsuit to-date has been done with in-house counsel.)

    I think the big value in the Unicom v. Rosenthal decision is that it provides the independent web publisher some peace of mind that some company cannot reach out, claim jurisdiction, and make them fight a long-distance lawsuit. That's very expensive and very difficult.