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UCSD Squabbles with Student Website
bunnie writes "Can publicly funded government organizations defend and prosecute their namespace? According to the University of California, yes. A student run website used as a public forum and text book exchange, ironically named ucsduncensored.com, was shut down under Education Code Section 92000. A nastygram from the university reflects the hard-line that UCSD is taking on this subject. Perhaps the UC Regents should trim some bored administrators from their payroll to help address the California budget crunch..." "UCSD" is clearly not an abbreviation of "University of California", so what's the problem?
I hope you were being facetious. "UCSD" is an extremely well-known abbreviation for the University of California at San Diego.
I looked at the "nastygram" and it wasn't particularly nasty; it was very straightforward, not unduly legalistic, and indicated that UCSD had contacted the ucsduncensored.com people a couple weeks ago and had apparently been blown off. Furthermore, this isn't a case where the USCD in the domain name was referring to something else (it was clearly "the" UCSD), and it wasn't a parody site that could claim First Amendment protection--it was a community site for UCSD students, and one that accepted advertising (look at Google's cache of the site).
You can argue UCSD is being undiplomatic or churlish, but they're hardly acting out of legal bounds here--and I'm not sure it's that ridiculous to start with, because it's not a UCSD service and putting "UCSD" in the front of the name suggests it is. Independent publications in college towns that are there to provide alternatives to official services don't use the college name in their name, even if they may use it in the subtitle. For instance, the "Independent Alligator" is referring to the University of Florida Gators, but they're not the "University of Florida Alligator," and if they tried to call themselves that, UF would be firmly within their rights to slap them. (Yes, "UCSD Uncensored" getting dinged for this is ironic, but the legal point still stands.)