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JRR Tolkien: Return Of The Domain Name
Malfourmed writes "Reuters reports that the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien won a cybersquatting case against Alberta Hot Rods, a Canadian-based operator which registered jrrtolkien.com and linked it to its commercial celebrity Web site. The group - which has already lost domain name cases brought by actors Pierce Brosnan and Pamela Anderson, and author Michael Crichton - was found to have no legitimate rights, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said in a ruling."
should be restricted to .com domains. That's what the TLD was supposed to mean. Any other TLD should be first-come, first-served
.com.au domains. You must have a registered business name that your selected domain name can be derived from. Of course, there were many people who thought that was too restrictive. In particular, the moron who writes for The Age and wanted property.com.au for a side venture of his. He gave Melbourne IT flack at every turn for not giving that domain to him (even though they weren't the ones who put the rules into place).
AFAIK we also have similar rules for .org.au domains.
That's what we do here with
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
So if that's the case, why on earth do we have .com .org etc?
If you want truth in advertising, then the biggest, best-known company or individual using a given name should really just be given the name, right? Why even bother registering? We could just go by annual income...
Really, what difference is it in confusion between going to jrrtolkien.com and seeing ads, than it is to go to tolkien.com and see nothing, because that's what happens, when you try it. This is why we have google...
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Nissan (the car company) sued Uzi Nissan (a technology company owner) to get his website. They [car corp] "lost" in the sense that they didn't get the domain name, but they convinced the court to totally neuter it: it cannot host any commercial content, nor can it link to any site that hosts commercial content.
Yeah, right.
I believe that at least in old English law you actually had to work the land and fence it.
In the web case it seems it was just forwarding on to some other site. You would hardly say that the site was developed.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Let me be the first to say, that the WIPO sucks ass. The company I'm with had their domain taken away despite having a good claim to it because we couldn't afford to send a lawyer to Geneva to argue our case.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Sadly no longer true: AU domain policies
The registering organisation must be a company, within a *very* loose definition - for example owning a registered trade mark qualifies you. The domain name must then either be derived from your organisation name (in a couple of obvious ways) *OR*:
The rules were loosened about a year and a half ago, at about the same time as auDA took over management of the .AU domain.
Originally the requirement for org.au was that the domain not fit any of the other categories. The new (auDA) requirement is that the organisation be a charity or non-profit organisation.
Quite different from the squatters and thieves that hijack popular names for shady purposes.
There is something called The Right of Publicity. In short, it is the right for a person to keep his identity from being exploited for commercial gain without his permission. This protection can last beyond death, but varies by state.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Specifically, squatting a porn site on a domain name that can be misleading (e.g. whitehouse.com) was made illegal with the federal Amber Alert law last year.
Except that 'Whitehouse' is the name of a lower-echelon upper-shelf magazine which has been in print in the UK for quite a while now. How, therefore, can they object to whitehouse.com?
(As an aside, I'm highly amused that you think the Whitehouse should be under a .com TLD. You cheeky liberal, you!)
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The law recognizes certain individuals as "public figures" with a set of rights that are separate from normal individuals.
And before you go all, "that's not fair!", just remember that the differences in rights of public figures aren't *always* (although frequently they are, I will grant you) in their favor.
For instance, in most states if I photograph or videotape you I can't use your image for personal financial gain (like, say, showing you on my reality TV show) without your permission, in most cases. But in the case of public figures, such as celebrities, sports figures, politicians, I most certainly can, as long as I'm telling the truth and as long as I'm being fair. Their image is recognized as having a symbolic value to the public over and above the value it has to that individual. This is why paparazzi can do what they do.
However, because these individuals are public figures, they own a piece of property that has value to them as well: their name. You can't call something Celine Dion Ice Cream, not unless the Celine Dion whose name is most likely meant to be used as a selling point gives her permission. It doesn't matter that there's another Celine Dion out there. Unless your other Celine Dion has established that her name has equal value in advertising or commerce, well, then the famous Celine trumps her because it's the famous Celine's name that is logically being used to pump the value of the ice cream, or what have you.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
It was allowed because the global .com domain registry doesn't ensure that you hold the registered name before letting you register it, unlike other more anal schemes such as .com.au.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
One can't just generally trademark a name. Trademarks are done in seperate sections (I don't know how many there are, but it is in the 20+ ammounts). For example, nothing prevents someone from registering a name for use with cars. Someone else can register the exact same name in the field of entertainmaint and so on. Take Diablo as an example, I recall seeing it as registered tradmark for cigarrs, cars and movie/games (a few similar fields) and possibly more, all by different companies. No problem at all. Sure, one can try to register ones name in ALL fields though. However, trademarks needs to be more or lesss activly used. You can't just register it and sit there waiting, you will then risk losing it (in say 5 years or something) to someone else.
For domain name cases it is for the same reason not at ALL a good reason to go with trademark since there can be many having registered the exact same name as a trademark. Who gets to use it? Obviously, no one else could use it in the filed someone else has it registered in, but other than that? Since top domains aren't grouped/named after trademark sections, it won't work well in many cases.
Alright, all this GNAA nonsense is crap.
The above post contains this link [idge.net]. Apparently the headquarters of the GNAA trolls.
Thanks to some handy WHOIS information, the contact info for that website is:
Registrant:
Lin-Tech Communications
1770 St James Place
Houston, Texas 77056
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: IDGE.NET
Created on: 09-Feb-02
Expires on: 09-Feb-04
Last Updated on: 05-Sep-03
Administrative Contact:
Jackson, Tim dns@lin-tech.net
Lin-Tech Communications
1770 St James Place
Houston, Texas 77056
United States
(936)371-9350 Fax --
Technical Contact:
Jackson, Tim dns@lin-tech.net
Lin-Tech Communications
1770 St James Place
Houston, Texas 77056
United States
(936)371-9350 Fax --
Call and email them and let them know what you think of the GNAA!
Cutting and pasting:
Look here for their info on what they do with cybersquatting..sig? No.