Molson Slapped in Domain Hijacking Attempt

Lew Pitcher writes "Well, it took a Canadian court to find that a Canadian citizen can own the domain name canadian.biz without being a beer (or a beer company). The Toronto Star is reporting that the Ontario Superiour Court has overruled ICANN's decision to take domain canadian.biz from its current owner and give it to Molson's Breweries (makers of "Canadian" brand beer). A spokesperson for Molsons gave the obligatory statement about disappointment in the decision, and indicated that it was too early to determine if Molsons would appeal the decision. Score one against the bad guys."

Comments

Blame ICANNada

[freerangegeek]

When I read about this in the previous slashdot posting, I was shocked that ICANN had ruled the way it had. Once again, money talks.

Kudo's to the Canadian court, but do they really have jurisdiction over ICANN? Does anyone? Or has this monster finally taken a life of it's own?

The precedent remains an appalling one.

I keep coming back to the concept of "Treehouse" from Tad William's Otherland series. Originally he conceived of it as a 'kill file' turned inside out. (Guess he used to be a USENET afficianado.)

Maybe it's time to create a TREEHOUSE of own with a set of new root DNS server shared on a P2P network. (Of course this TREEHOUSE would be conceived of as a DNS system turned inside out.) I can serve abcdxxxx.com through abdexxxx.com! ;)

By now there has to be sufficient bandwidth out there to support something like this. Good grief if we have enough spare cycles to find extraterrestrial life (seti.org) and bankrupt the RIAA with Napster, we have compute power to leave ICANN in the dust.

Re:Blame ICANNada

[daoine]

So, apparently any soveriegn nation has this type of jurisdiction over ICANN. So, when ICANN goes out and does something stupid (such as this decision), the courts of the nation(s) affected can correct the problem.

Which begs the question, what the hell does ICANN do now anyway? If two people have a dispute over a domain, ICANN will rule, and then the loser will take the winner to court. Why not skip the ICANN step, and head straight to court?

Unless the loser is a little guy who can't afford to take a big company to court... But then, wouldn't it be better if said little guy just got bought out rather than lost through arbitration?

I'm not sure what the point of an arbitrator is if the arbitration is mostly meaningless...

Re:Blame ICANNada

[topham]

The easy part of this, both the individual and the company are Canadian. This puts full jurisdiction on the Canadian courts.

The other thing is that the courts basicly stepped forward and said that something resembling a trademark ISNT necessarily a trademark and ICANN shouldn't treat it as such.

"Canadian" is NOT a trademark of Molsens. "Molsen Canadian" is.

increasing irrelevance of bad beer

[epine]

Thankfully, most of Canada has a thriving microbrew industry these days that makes the national brands taste like sour corn syrup by comparison. The occassional batch stands against the best German or British exports, though not with great consistency.

One strange thing is that the Guiness generally gets better the closer you get to Ireland. Once in a blue moon the Guiness on the west coast has a head you can properly sculpt. The Guiness in Halifax is generally reliable, and if you pick the right place, the Guiness in Montreal can often be excellent.

Quebec is an interesting place beer wise. The beer selection tends to be fairly cosmopolitan. If you do chose a Quebec beer, it'll likely grow some hair on your chest. Barly retisa by the jug.

Molsons primarily appeals to the kind of person were lack of surprise is the only requirement. There are so many good good beers and so many good bad beers, I can't understand why anyone would drink Molsons at all, but there's no explaining taste.

I can see how the judge would look askance at Molson's attempt to patent the Maple Leaf. These days Tim Hortons is a much stronger national brand. They probably ran into the same problem that Microsoft faced in the court room: the judge was all too familiar with their product line.

Re:increasing irrelevance of bad beer

[Papineau]

Another thing slows the spread of micros: the taxes per liter of beer. I believe (DISCLAIMER: I DO own 500 Unibroue stock) that the tax is higher for micros than for big breweries, so those can have a lower price because of that tax (I think it's something along 9 cents per liter for the big guys, to something around 28 cents per liter for the micros) in addition to scale economies.

IIRC, the rationale for the tax difference is that it's easier for the government to control the cleanliness, etc. of the big guys, than it is to control the smaller ones. The micros are trying to get that tax uniformised, but of course the big breweries lobby against it.

For Joe Sixpack, the price of his sixpack matters. If the micros' is a buck or two higher, there's a non negligible probability that he'll take the Coors Lite over the Blanche de Chambly, even though the latter won the Gold Medal of the Beverage Testing Institute of Chicago in 1997, 1998 and 1999.

Re:Oh, Man!

[WEFUNK]

I really hope your comment title was an intentional double-entendre.

Yep. Although calling my shamelessly bad pun a 'double-entendre' suggests far more wit than it deserves. I wasn't sure if anyone would notice, based on this story being relegated to the boonies.

On that note, until today I never realized how many positive stories are posted to YRO that never make it to the main section. Looking down at the list of recent stories, almost without exception the negative ones make it to the front page and the positive ones seem lucky to be accepted at all. I wouldn't really blame the editors either, it seems that the better the news - even really important good news - the fewer the comments, and that the real outrages post hof numbers. I suppose the bias we usually attribute to the mass media is a more general one that even applies to our own community.

I suppose that good news is sometimes harder to comment on beyond a simple "I agree" - especially when it's a justification of common sense like this story. Still, I wish the Slashdot front page could be more balanced since it's otherwise such a good tool to gauge the state of affairs and trends in online rights.

Wow - I didn't mean to turn a short off-topic reply into such a long rant!