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AOL accused of domain name hijacking
Michael Fischer sent us an interesting
story about AOL using trademark leverage on African-America OnLine Search, which had been registered in Sept of 1998 as aolsearch. AOL wanted to use it as the search location for their web site, although it does not seem to be currently in use. The {former} owner of the domain is accusing of Network Solutions of "an arrogant, indifferent attitude" to the problems surrounding the dispute.
Oh yeah, to put this back on topic...
I believe that AOL will succeed in stealing aolsearch.com. (Actually, thay have already been successful, and I doubt that the origional owner will succeed in getting it back)
Why? Because AOL is a trademark. AOLSearch is a natural and logical extension to that trademark. AOL has been around and has used the AOL brand for years. Any judge in this land will side with AOL. Especially since AOL is an internet company who provides search services. I was recently involved in another domain name despute. A client of mine registered tumbleweedsbar.com. This client owns a bar called Tumbleweeds. There is a company in Kentucky that owns a whole chain of restaurants called Tumbleweeds. Both are valid company names, as there is no Tumbleweeds here in Florida. Tumbleeds of Kentucky succesfully sued for the use of the domain name tumbleweedsbar.com. The judge sided with them because they had established the trademark tumbleweeds and also had bars in their restaurants. The Judge decreed that a natural confusion would result in my clients use of the domain name tumbleweedsbar.com. The law seems to place imphasis on customer perception. This is why Gateway can sue other computer companies who use cows in advertisements, but can't sue the dairy industry. There would be no customer confusion, as the two companies do completely different things. In the case of aolsearch.com, AOL has clearly offered search capabilities to its clients for as long as it has been in business, so customer confusion is highly likely to occur. In fact, I would be willing to bet that many of the hits to the OLD aolsearch.com site where by people trying to find an AOL search engine, not the African-American OnLine Search that they ended up finding. I personally believe that this was a case of deliberate deception on the case of African-American Online. I know that when I first heard the name aolsearch.com I INSTANTLY thought of AOL (American OnLine) not anything else. I believe that this was an attempt just like whitehouse.com to lure unsuspecting people to a site that did not contain the expected content.
I do not agree with the method AOL used to obtain control of the domain name. This case should have gone to court. Network Solutions has placed themselves in a precarious position on this one, and I believe has opened themselves up for suit. I believe AOL has the right to control AOLSearch.com but I do not believe that it is up to NSI to mediate that right, nor to just hand over the domain when requested. NSI should maintain a stance of neutrality, and then abide by whatever the courts decide.
-Count Zero-
The point is that Congress is trying to criminalize otherwise legitimate transactions. The basis for laws should be "provable harm". Who is harmed by me registering bigcorp.com, as long as I am not actually trying to fraudulently pass myself off as _being_ BigCorp? No one. A domain name is not a corporation, and owning a domain with the same name as a corporation is not automatically an infringement on their trademark. The Metropolitan Opera, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Metropolitan Auto Repair, and Metropolitan Catering can all exist without the existence of any of them being considered an infringement on the trademark of any other; we've long accepted that multiple entities can have the same name. Likewise with web sites.
:-)
The possession of a domain name therefore not being automatically an infringement on an existing trademark, the ownership of a domain name representing an existing trademark is legitimate. If the ownership of the name is legitimate, the sale and transfer thereof must also be legitimate.
IANAL, but if I were, this would be what I'd argue.
Is cybersquatting really that evil? I've always thought of the domain name business as something similar to real estate. If I know a company wants to put a mall in the vacant lot across the street, it's a good idea for me to buy that lot before they do.
I could see exceptions in cases where the name infringes on a trademark. In the real world, though, most of us who want to register a domain spend a long time trying to find names that aren't already taken. So AOL's "first" choice was taken -- boo hoo. Do what the rest of us who can't afford legal departments do -- pay up or pick a different name.
I don't think that cybersquatting is a real _classy_ thing to do, but I'm uncomfortable with legislation against it. IMHO, lawyers and politicians have a history of Bad Ideas when it comes to technology. How clear will those laws be? Who wants to be dragged into court to defend their site because an advertising agency decided they should have your domain name?
Finally, I don't think a cybersquatting law would matter in this case. The domain was actually in use. There does not appear to be any intent to infringe on the aol trademark. Does just using the letters 'a', 'o', and 'l' make you a trademark violator?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Isn't this they've behaved in EVERY domain name dispute?
Hindsight is 20/20...
Wah!
Shit... Whatever happened to free trade? Oh, I forgot...America.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Anyone stupid enough to register an domain name which is so similar to a big company deserves the grief.
.sig, "You shall cooperate with Microsoft for the good of Microsoft and for your own survival". I guess it depends on how much do you want to survive...
Well, yes and no. If you take the stance that the world works this way and there is nothing you can do about it, then yes, it's much better not to annoy big corporations and powerful entities in general. Such a position generally makes life easier, more comfortable and, most of the time, allows you to achieve more. The downside is that once in a while the big corporation/government/etc. will come and say "Bend over and spread your legs, now that's a good boy!" and that can be mighty unpleasant and sometimes even fatal.
You can take the other stance as well and say that in principle there is no difference between a AOL and a mom-and-pop operation running out of a spare bedroom -- they both have the same rights, don't they? So if the big bad corporation want some priviledge, you slap it back and keep slapping until one of you (hint: in 99% of the cases it's not the big corp) keels over. The plus side is that you conscience is very happy and once in a while you'll change the world for the better. The minus side is that it's easy to dedicate your life to fighting a faceless bureaucratic monster with no results and your life or large chunks of it ends up being spend for nothing.
As has been pointed out in some Usenet
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Perhaps this is an instance in which the massive readership of Slashdot could do some good. I don't think that there is any chance that AOL is going to relinquish this domain any time soon, however perhaps a flood of emails asking informing AOL executives of the situation and asking that:
A) AOL provide for the costs of registering a new domain for the African-Americans online search engine (perhaps aaolsearch.com) and
B) AOL put up a web page on the now void aolsearch.com domain which links to the african americans online search page for some agreeable amount of time (I would suggest a year)
I believe that if we send enough rationally worded emails that these two goals really are achievable. To a large company like AOL public image is really important and if they get 500 emails saying that this move has tarnished their public image they might just do something.
*** ONE FINAL NOTE ***
Flamers please don't participate. The rational statements of hundreds of voices can be easily discounted if a person recieves 5 emails telling them to eat sh*t etc. etc. It's time to give our community a positive image again, not vent our pent up adolescent aggression.
Many people would argue that the data isn't NSI's to control in the first place. Also, if this license appears only after you do a domain name lookup, then it may not be valid. For example:
Obviously this isn't legally enforceable, and I expect eventually NSI's "agreement" on whois results will be found similarly unenforceable.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Since apparently the standard in trademark disputes is consumer confusion, I propose this poll:
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
There is a difference between registering something as blatant as Burger King and registering an acronym that America OnLine uses as a substitute for their name. Her organization happens to have the word OnLine in it as well which is not surprising these days. Hence we have the O and the L. Now from the first part of the organization's name, we could either use the A or a double-A. I think that either way, AOL was going to be ticked off. From the name of her organization, I could come up with two.. well four different options.
www.aolsearch.com
www.aaolsearch.com
www.aols.com
www.aaols.com
The first three are quite likely to annoy America OnLine. The last one is just not very appealing. She could have simply used the last one, but I don't see why she should have to. An acronym is an acronym. The letters will be the same, but the meaning is different. Is there any way someone visiting her site would confuse it with America OnLine's site? I doubt it. So where is the consumer confusion? I think AOL was out of line, plain and simple. You shouldn't be able to take someone's domain just because they use the same acronym as you.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I think the behavior of AOL and NSI is incredible arrogant, unseen! They totally contradict past behavior.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
According to a whois query, aolsearch.com is indeed now registered to America Online, Inc.
Looks like maybe both AOL and NSI need a bit of a slap, and I for one hope they get it.
Stopping "cybersquatting" is one thing, but effectively stealing a domain name that is in use for a legitiamte site just isn't on.
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Microsoft should sue AOL since AOL has seemingly stolen intellectual rights on how to do business from Microsoft.
there is always one person who throws in the racial theory... why must everything be about race/religion/sex???
> ERROR: IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in module MSCONV97.DLL at 0137:01212d19. Stack dumped:
1) Just cybersquat down over there, the doctor will be right with you.
2) Next week in gym class, we'll be doing cybersquat-thrusts.
3) Cybersquatting will be on page 171 on the upcoming edition of the Kama Sutra.
4) You don't know cybersquat, kid!
5) Was that your dog cybersquatting on my lawn earlier? I hope you're planning to clean that up.
6) I don't know. Maybe the universe cybersquatted, maybe God changed his mind...all I know is that we got a second chance.
7) FREE FREE FREE SEX VIDEO OF PAMELA AND TOMMY CYBERSQUATTING!!!
-
It is worth the hassle of registering a domain name anymore? There have been cases of Commercial sites sueing owners of .org sites. .org, Not-for profit as I was left to believe, so a business could not use such. There have been cybersquatting cases where the business had won...even if the business didn't even exist when the site was put up. It's just not worth it to have a personal webpage anymore unless you do a www.isp_name.com/~username/index.html.
.per for personal websites. .xxx for porn sites. .spam for anysite that is going to be posting unsolicited e-mail (god I'd love to put a .spam filter in my e-mail). Things like that. Names that are seperate from each other, and cannot be crossed.
There needs to be three things.
1. Add more site designations.
2. Laws that enforce #1 above. Laws that prevent things like a company who holds a trademark on a word like "Sylvan" from suing a person who has a personal website dedicated to his Role-Playing game based on a setting in a elven or "Sylvan" setting
3. We need to stop companies from putting trademarks on words in the english language. Take AOL for example. They tried to sue for the phrase "You've got mail". How do describe the concept of having mail, without using any of these world You've, got, and mail? Short of "a piece of corispondance has arrived via the postal service for one [insert name here]". Pretty darn awkward isn't it. How long before we can't talk to a neighbor with out having to put a nickle in a jar, per word uttered, and having to send it to the people who hold the trademarks?
Well, that was my two credits worth...let's see, I owe about $15.05
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"