Chip Rosenthal Wins Unicom Domain Name Case

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."

Comments

Not a ruling on merits, but interesting anyway

[dinotrac]

First things first: Congratulations, Chip.

This decision, though good for Chip, does not address the merits of the case, only the question of whether a California Court has jurisdiction to hear it. Presumably, the plaintiffs could got to a Federal Court somewhere and get the case heard (disclaimer: I don't know all of the facts, so that is merely a presumption on my part)

That doesn't mean the decision isn't interesting. The judge includes a nice discussion of purposeful availment and standards used to decide when the operator of a web site has or has not made him/herself subject to a jurisdiction's laws. Very good to see that mere presence doesn't trip the wire.

Never even been to Texas

[Alien54]

IANAL, but apparently the claim was a california company trying to take the domain name of the arizona operation, when the two were never in competition.

The plaintiffs failed to show that the they had even bothered to do business or anything else in Texas, and so the california court could not compell a Texas business to had over the Domain name.

Also, the plaintiff had abandoned their trade mark in 1994. and were trying to assert it now.

doh

Re:He didn't REALLY win--jurisdictional issues

[BlueUnderwear]

Having been to law school myself, I am shocked and ashamed that you are still awake in cipro. Of course, now you kids all have your wireless internet and your laptops in class.

Which explains why he was not asleep. He was surfing instead ;-)