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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."
So now he'll have "one webring to rule them all --" oh forget it.
you know everyone just clicked onto jrrtolkien.com and saw all their ads. the company is making their money back.
all is well
Imagine if homesteaders had their land taken away back in the 1800's by corporations who claimed that they actually had rights to the land, even though the corps never set foot on the land and had no interest in it until they saw how profitable the land was.
I have been pwned because my
I have a relatively uncommon first-name, but one of the few people who shares it registered it as a domain name relatively early in the history of the web. If I were to become famous, I'd almost certainly be known by first-name alone, as there are only a small handful of entertainers with this name, and none of them are "stars".
So all I need to do now is become famous, and that domain is mine!
You mean the railroad is coming to town?
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Wow. The law actually worked and wasn't evil or nothing for once. Good on them.
www.celebrity1000.com contains nude pics of JRR Tolkien I think they are out of luck :p
You know, there are two sides to this coin. There's the side from the 'squatter where they see the land, they grab it, and they hold on to it. They do this from their own pocket, hoping to make some money selling the land to whoever wants it at a later date. There's the side from the person that desires such land, sometimes for reasons of their trademark, or their name. This is where the 'squatter tries to get them to pay large amounts of money for the domain. Now, the 'squatter probably should get SOME money back from their initiative (cost, maybe?) but not be allowed to extort millions from whoever wants the website. Although I admit that the land analogy is flawed..I would have more respect for the 'squatter if they actually were trying to get a fair deal out of it, instead of, "Give us $1,000,000,000, or we'll pwn u, n00b!"
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I hate to be unpopular, but the guy is dead, right? Does he really have the same rights to his name as somebody who is alive?
Can anyone who's making money off their dead relatives make a case for the name? Seems to me that neither of the parties actually suing for or using the name actually *wrote* LoTR...
Just an alternative opinion...
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
The ruling makes sense to me. "J.R.R. Tolkien" isn't a trademark per se, but it is a (very particular) pronoun, so its use as a domain name should be reserved for the Tolkien Estate, not some random cyber-squatter. Infringing trademarks in registering domain names is an obvious no-no ... but I wonder, suppose there actually was someone named J.R.R. Tolkien, and he registered this domain? Would he still have a legitimate right to the domain, or would the domain be taken away from him, even though it was his name?!
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I can write a book about Tolkien and title it "The Life of Tolkien". Why shouldn't I be able to get a domain name with his name, as long as I state I'm not he (or his heirs)? Businesses I understand - trademarks, etc. Maybe there should be a top level domain for "unofficial", so you'd have jrrtolkien.official and jrrtolkien.unofficial. A litter cumbersome but you get the point.
This company brands itself "Celebrity 1000" and sadly, they and many others like them are cybersquatting on at least that many celebrity named domains. just try a few of your favorite celebrities. I'm not sure how this was ever legal to start with, and can't believe that to date this is only the 4th case brought against these fools. They're the papparazzi of the internet, making free money off the endeavors of others.
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog
bought the land with the intent to profit off of the name of the corporation then yes, I'd expect as much.
People need to get it through their thick skulls that trying to profit off of other people's names is not acceptible.
If the guy's name was Tolkien then he might have a case. As it is, he's just typical low life internet scum trying to profit off of other people's name.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
As a Tolkien fan I believe that the domain name should be cast into the fiery pit at Mt. Doom, so that it may never again be used to trouble the world.
The key here is how you use the domain name. IF your use is non-exploitive of the entity, specifically if it's someone famous, you can potentially hold it. I.e. If someone named James Hendrix had his personal web page on jimihendrix.com, he'd have a good case to fend off the Hendrix estate, as opposed to pointing the domain to some site clearly attempting to capitalize on the famous Jimi Hendrix.
A friend of mine actually had the domain AMERICAONLINE.COM for many years. He offered to sell it to AOL and they blew him off and expressed no interest. His problem was the domain was not in use and when he decided to put up a web page, it said, "This domain for sale". Within days of the site going up, he received a threatening letter from AOL's lawyers. I am not sure, but I think they scared him into giving them the domain. He screwed up by not having a legitimate web site that wasn't exploitive of AOL then he might have had a case to fight. But in this circumstance the guy basically snatched the name because it was available, so he was trying to take advantage of AOL's famous name. If he had a web site on that domain for example, that was a messageboard for "American's online" or something not exploitive of AOL's identity, he probably could have fought off AOL, or at least forced them to settle with him.
Generally speaking, the law has been pretty reasonable in dealing with these cases. There are probably exceptions though.
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Thank you and have a nice day.
XML causes global warming.
The really original homesteaders were forced off their lands by white people with guns, marched en masse to reservations, given smallpox-ridden blankets, and starved into oblivion.
We are now fully off-topic...
All's true that is mistrusted
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
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.
I don't agree with the whining people who moan because of cybersquatters. Those that put into common use the // in a hyperlink and the . before the domain extension could, in theory, say that slashdot is unfairly using their property to prosper. I, personally, think it's a 'first-come, first-serve' situation.
/opinion
If someone yanked 'mcdonalds.com' and was using it to slander mcdonalds, sue them for libel, but they have the right to rent that domain for as long as they pay for it. This babysitting by the courts for corporate welfare is just over the line. I don't know why I'm so outraged by the very idea of this, but I am.
SCO: We own all you source code!
Slashdotters: How so? We wrote it!
SCO: We just do!
Compared to:
JRR Tolkien Estates: We own that domain!
Sqautter: How so? I bought it!
Estates: We just do!
Although squatting is sleazy, I don't see why it's illegal. If there are magic reserved names that the general public can't buy then don't sell them in the first place. The guy bought it before JRR Tolkien estates, and made no reference to JRR Tolkien or LoTR so no trademark infringement occured. For all they know he could have thought it sounded like a l337 name for a porn site. So the lesson learned is that corporations have control over you no matter where you live, thanks to the U.N. and WIPO. It's just another example of a company saying they own something that they don't.
The difference between this guy and people sticking "I pwn this!" signs every thirty miles in virgin country is that this guy actually paid- through legal process -the deed for this land. Let's say that land had a famous hill named Tokkien Hill (JRRTokkien wrote his books up there on warm summer nights, ok?). That, by no means gives the Tokkien Estate the right to kick you off and set up a printing shop in their namesake no matter what you are doing with the land, ESPECIALLY after being duly and legally appointed the land.
Infact, just like real life, the value of the land increases the more people want it. If you want a piece of land on the beach in California, you can expect to pay big bucks for it because it's prime location. Guess what? JRRTokkien.com is prime real estate and thus the owner of that domain should get just compensation, if not exactly the price he asks for it. This guy had the foresight to pay $50 for the domain (or whatever) and now it's worth $5 million. He was in the right place at the right time with the right idea before shit became popular. Had the internet lost steam, his $50 could have been wasted. Would the Tokkien franchise have compensated him for that since they now have such a dire attachment to it?
Sorry, but this guy got shafted hard. He bought the land and wisely positioned himself for a trend that should have paid out huge. The Tokkien estate, however, missed the boat. People miss the boat every day and are told tough shit for better reasons than this. I don't care how many books the dead guy wrote Tokkien Hill, the squater should be paid the value of the property as it stands today, just like any other much sought after piece of land. He was there first, legally.
The only exception I would make to this is using the domain to slander somebody else of the same name. Anything else is pure BS.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I remember that case, and I'm sad to see how it turned out. The court sure goatsed him. The commercial use to which he was previously putting that domain name was his small business, a computer shop, IIRC. Nothing whatsoever to do with cars, and he'd been in business for years under his name, since the days when Nissan still called itself Datsun in North America.
Poor guy. He really got shafted. Guess which Japanese auto maker will have a zero percent chance of selling me my next car?
Cutting and pasting:
Look here for their info on what they do with cybersquatting..sig? No.
Hasbro sued Clue Computing and apparently lost, and in a pretty similar case (IMHO)
Hasbro sued Candyland.com and apparently won.
Candyland and Clue are both "popular" Hasbro games. Clue and Candyland were both small companies (not hard to guess the industries). Can anyone explain the differences in these cases to me, besides the obvious (and hopefully irrelevant legally)?
I think .com should have this rule put into effect (like on so many other registries), then have some major cleaning up done and those who didn't have a registered name (i.e. free-viagra-now.com) be moved to the .info registry.
.com regardless.
.tm domain, e.g. uk.tm, us.tm, etc. then it would work pretty well, but that assumes (a) .tm isn't already a TLD for some country (I haven't checked), (b) each country administers its .tm according to its own trademark laws, and (c) it won't matter unless we can get the f*cking lawyers out of the other domains and into the .tm domain where they belong (good luck getting parasites out of anything).
While I agree that such a rule would have been nice from day one, it does have its problems.
1) trademarks are not unique
a) they are limited by "domain" (e.g. Macintosh(tm) for apples can exist in parallel with Macintosh(tm) for computers)
b) they are limited by geography (e.g. in the US, I can own "SourceMagic"(tm) in Illinois, while in Wisconsin someone else may have the same trademark for the same "domain", and national trademarks for x in Germany can be owned by one company, and a completely different company may have the same exact trademark registered in Canada or the United States).
This works for national domains, such as co.uk, where (a) there aren't state or local trademarks, only national trademarks (or they only allow national trademarks to use the domain), but it won't work for most trademarks in an international domain such as
Now, if one wanted to make a
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