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Toys R Us Isn't Toying With Gus

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bully-of-the-day dept.

NutBat writes "News.com has an article about Toys "R" Us threatening legal action against a guy named Gus Lopez who runs a site with the domain toysrgus.com for his Star Wars toy collection. It seems that he will be backing down." It appears that Gus' website did not sell anything despite the .com suffix, although I have not been able to confirm this. The letter sent to Gus is on his website, and is worth reading. Ajax.org and veronica.org were resolved due to public pressure. Perhaps this one will be too? Toys R US has a customer service page

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. OK, what about this site??? by Omega+Hacker · · Score: 2

    After discovering that the "Customer service page" returned some error or another, I tried going to www.toysrus.com, but typed a little to fast and got to www.toyrus.com. Now, www.toyrus.com is owned by a company called '37' or somesuch, which points the browser directly at 37.com, which is "the worlds fastest, most complete search engine".

    Obviously 37.com is not a toy company, or in any way related to toys, but at the very least it's not exactly the most honest way to get hits. And if I were Toys 'R' Us, I'd take offense just at the claim they make of being the fastest/'completest' engine out there, which is a blatantly false claim.

    If I could actually get to the Toys 'R' Us Customer Service page, I would make myself very clear that when it comes time to shop for toys (no kids, no plans, but one of these days...), this little incident will most definitely impact whether or not I go to Toys 'R' Us.

    I would urge Gus to not back down, as I see no legal reason for him to give up his domain. Specifically, the letter from Darby & Darby (rather lame name, don't you think?) mentions that Toys 'R' Us has a series of "'R' Us marks". Am I the only one noticing that Gus is using "'R' Gus"??? And what if his last name were Argus???? (yeah, dumb, but possible)

    It's hard to hide my disgust at these kind of tactics, and I'm rather annoyed that Gus is backing down. Perhaps we can convince him not to back down so easily, and write to Toys 'R' Us in quantity sufficient to get their attention...

    --
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  2. Only play with people who won't hit back by CopiceC · · Score: 2

    Toys-R-Pus have a bit of a point, and so does Gus. On the other hand Gus is playing with fire by treading on the toes of someone with more more expensive lawyers.

    What really annoyed me recently was to find thousands of surnames grabbed by a bunch in Canada.

    My surname is Underwood. I did a check for underwood.com - that was taken by a Jenny Underwood. Fair enough, she got there first. Then I tries underwood.org, and found it registered to the "Underwood E-mail" service in Vancouver. I tried underwood.net, and they had that one too. Then I tried some other surnames, and found every one taken by ".... E-mail Service", with the same address, administrator, name server, etc. If you go to their web site they are trying to sell you a third level doamin, based on your surname for $4.95 a year.

    Now in some ways they are helping to share out these domains amongst a lot of people with the same surname. It seems too much like a scam, though. I feel content that I lost out on underwood.com to a real Underwood. I feel these other people are just trying to exploit me, though. If they were genuinely trying to run a business providing a service for people of the same name they wouldn't have registered all the .net names too.