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Henley.com, Reznor.com. Is Your Name Next?
Here at Slashdot we tend to get certain things submitted a lot. Big companies going after "The Little Guy", especially regarding domain names seems to be one of them. Sometimes I feel bad for people because they owned trademarked names, but it looks like they are just squatting, but what about your name? Henley.com is being chased by
Don Henley (thanks Netizen) and
Reznor.com is owned by AJ Reznor
being chased by Thomas & Betts. In each case, a person registered the name given to them at birth, but now a corporation wants to take it because they have a trademark. How do you protect your name?
The following Was taken from the official unofficial ninfaq version 7.3
"As a matter of fact, there *is* a connection! The Reznor company was founded in 1888 in (you guessed it!) Mercer, PA by one George Reznor, an ancestor of Trent's. (We don't know the specifics of the relationship, but we think it's his great- or great-great grandfather...) In addition to starting the company, George also invented the original Reznor gas heater, which was one of the first heaters designed for domestic use. To quote the company brochure:
"Reznor was founded in 1888 to manufacture the 'Reznor' reflective heater, which utilized a luminous flame gas burner developed by George Reznor. This technological breakthrough was an immediate success and hastened the expansion of gas heating in residential and commercial applications. Technological development and innovation have been the hallmark of Reznor through the years."
(In other words, if not for Trent's family, we'd all be sitting around freezing our butts off and listening to (your choice of lousy band or musician here)...so think of them whenever you're snuggled up in your nice toasty home listening to music while it's freezing cold outside!)
The Reznor family apparently sold the business to an outside company around World War II (it's currently owned by ITT/Thomas & Betts), but it's still in business today, cranking out various types of heaters and central heating & cooling units, in addition to being the single largest employer in Mercer. (According to the regional representative's secretary, the biggest Reznor customers in Georgia are schools and prisons; the company doesn't really do small-scale domestic heating any more, but a few homes do still have Reznor systems.) The most common places to run into Reznors are restaurants, small stores and boutiques, garages, barns, nightclubs and bars, especially if they're located in an older building or a warehouse-type setting. Most of the heaters you'll see are small-to-medium sized ceiling- mounted, gas-powered units w/a fan in the back, and tend to come in 2 basic styles: (1) silver-toned metal with "REZNOR" in raised letters on the front; and (2) painted metal with a small plaque (or "ratings plate") that says "REZNOR/Mercer, Pennsylvania" bolted onto either the lower front corner or on the side.
Apparently a Reznor heater plays a prominent role in the Sean Connery/ Nicolas Cage movie The Rock, falling on and squishing one of the actors.
Probably a bit too much info but hey we only use 10% of our brain anway the other 90%, can hold some of this Mindless BS
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I registered my family name as a domain name in Germany: www.koehntopp.de. To protect me from lawsuits, and to offer other people of the same name an opportunity to have their family name as a domain name, I offer free links to homepages and mail aliases for that domain, if they live in Germany and go by the proper family name.
Some other people I know are doing just the same, even linking companies of that name. Avoids confusion and creates fair access to the name.
On the first point, if they do really have operations that legitimately fall under all three TLD classifications, then they should be able to legitimately get domains in all three. As for shell entities, you'll never be able to stop them but you can make them go to the hassle of setting up believable entities. To be honest, I'd add one more rule to DNS, basically 'use it or lose it'. If a domain isn't active, has no active addresses registered under it and has no traffic except to bounce people to another domain, anyone who wants it can use that as grounds to challenge the registration and get it revoked. It won't stop a determined company, but it will raise the bar some.
As for mis-use, little can be done about that before the fact. I'd say, though, that yes if you mis-use a TLD you should have your registration yanked. If you're a for-profit business operating under a a .org name, ICANN shouldn't be going hunting for you but if anyone complains they should give you a warning to switch to the proper domain or lose your registration.
That depends on how you organize ICANN. Personally, I'd set it up with enough people in control with enough conflicting interests that it's not feasible to bribe everyone you'd need to bribe. And the foreign law firm would still be seen as the interloper suing the local operation. The idea is to set it up so that anyone making a challenge within the ICANN system would, if the challenge is reasonable, have support within ICANN, but nobody can get enough support to write their own ticket unless they really do deserve it and nobody can try applying pressure from outside through legal maneuvering without hitting exactly the same barriers the big corporations have been using to their advantage to date. And I wouldn't pick a banana republic, but as I said some small South Pacific island where you can literally know everyone in the entire national government. Big law firms don't work against that.
ICANN isn't entirely set up this way at present, but that can be changed under ICANN rules. And as a US citizen I really have to question whether US law should have any say in how the rather international DNS system is run. I really think that ICANN and such should be outside any one country's laws and staffed by people who are more concerned with the technical than the political/legal aspects. But maybe I'm being overly-idealistic.
You've obviously never tried to get a .us domain name. I've registered more than 250 of them in the past 6 years. Each time, it is a pain. A different organization controls each state_name.us domain, and then many more different organizations control the city_name.state_name.us. Then, even more control the organization.city_name.state_name.us names. Of course, first you have to figure-out the organization name scheme. For example co. is "county of" and ci. is "city of". Each state_name.us seems to have made-up their own complicated scheme. For example, I tried to get firesaftey.ci.paloalto.ca.us domain name for the local fire department. I had to trackdown the organization that controls the .ca.us domains to get their permission. Then, paloalto.ca.us, then ci.paloalto.ca.us. After all of that, the city turned down the request for the fire department. Also, I've had existing domains like ci.some_city.ca.us taken from the owning city, because the ca.us dictator didn't like it's content. There are not uniformly enforced rules, so it's next to impossible to obtain and keep a .us domain name. You think NSI is bad? Just wait until you have to deal with some two-bit dictator that considers the whatever.us domain name he owns to be his personal property. In several cases, I've had the appointed whatever.ca.us dictator take customers from me. It's bad when you can't get a domain name, but the dictator (in most cases, an ISP) calls-up your customer (they have that information, because you have to give it to them) and gives them a sales pitch. Atleast NSI doesn't do that.
Some folks may remember the story here several months ago about theos.com.
Seems there is a software company called theos, that wanted the domain. Currently, i belongs to Theo De Raadt, leader of the OpenBSD project.
The short version of the story is that Theo got to keep it, I believe primarily because the software company realized that Theo was more popular than they, and they would be doing themselves PR damage.
I remeber something a while back with Avery (yah know the labels) not being able to get a domain name for the company.
I know in Australia, .com.au only goes to businesses, and they have some wierd one for family names
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We need to get over our
-r
wouldn't it make sense to require a tax ID to register a .com (commercial) domain?!?
/.?!?
Likewise, create two new TLD's:
    .inc (incorporated) - requires art. of inc.
    .ind (individual) - no last names
Also, fees should be commensurate to TLD:
    .inc - $1K/yr
    .com - $500/yr
    .ind - $100/yr
any thoughts?!?
thor
ps. anyone else having probs connecting to
Think international. Think impossible to regulate.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Enough said.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Here's what seems to me a squatter on my last name. So, I had to settle for an .org address. Domain squatters need to rot in hell.
I just don't understand the logic (or rather the lack thereof) on the part of these companies. If reznor.com is taken, look at reznorheaters.com or something along those lines. It's effective to customers, and saves on legal fees. If you really HAVE to have reznor.com, work with the owner. See if you can buy it. See if you can strike a deal where you'll pay to host their pages for a year, and include a pointer and keep their mail bouncing to the new address for a year or three.
A company that I used to work for took this approach on a domain we wanted and it worked wonderfully. Cost us $10,000 plus another two grand in hosting fees. $12,000 is about what, 24 hours of time for legal counsel? Much, much cheaper AND we didn't upset the current owner and risk the associated bad press.
It would seem to me that domain names are equivalent to street names: if I open up a hamburger shop on "McDonald's Ave." nobody would ever claim that I am infringing upon somebody's trademark and that I should move my company. However, this is exactly what people are suggesting for domain names. Saying domain names are somehow "rightfully" owned by somebody other than the entity who purchased them is as absurd as saying that McDonalds owns all the property surrounding its resturants, even if it never bothered to purchase it.
Domain names are a limited resource, and hence obey supply and demand.
There are a couple of ways this system could work, the simplest being what we currently have: first come first served. This FCFS system is effectively treating domain names like land property -- whoever owns the land controls how it is used, regardless of whether or not somebody else could use it "better" (a subjective and essentially meaningless term). With this mindset, it is totally absurd to even suggest that somebody else could "claim" a domain that they don't own (minus the government, of course) -- it would be like McDonald's claiming to own the property next to it's resturants, or claiming to own all the land that is on all roads named "McDonald", "McDonald's", "MacDonalds", etc. I understand that it's important for companies to protect their trademarks, but the location of their business (their domanin name is merely a convenient, easy to remember name for their business location -- like saying "the corner of 5th and 7th") is completely unrelated to this.
Now, some may say "But some companies name themselves based upon their location: Amazon.com, EBay.com, etc." This works just fine as long as you own the location -- it would be like me naming my resturant "5th and 7th". However, if I name my business as such *before* purchasing the land, and it turns out that somebody else owns that land, I have no claim upon it.
By saying that companies somehow own all the land associated with their name, it is yet another way that The System is biased toward the large corporations over the small companies. First we must recognize that none of what we talk about is handed to us from God or written in stone -- there are no intrinsic Rights involved. As such, whatever we say you "can" and "cannot" do is purely fictional, and purely up to us to decide. We can decide to create a system that doesn't make any sense and ends up benefiting only those people that can pay enough in legal fees to keep the issue so clouded up that it will never be resolved, or we can choose to make a system that is simple and self regulating. By saying that trademark owners somehow have implicit Rights concerning domain names, we have a system that is chaotic and totally subjective -- there is no objective way to measure who is "right". If, on the other hand, we create system where domain names are owned by a single entity, there is no fuzziness to the issue, and we can objectively ask "Who owns this Domain Name", an it can be resolved without conflict or bias by looking at the deed.
That would be a good idea, except that would create too many possibilities. A domain name is used because it's easy to remember. Otherwise why have one? With all those possible variations, a company would get stuck with a name that no one new. .com is engrained in America's mind, and that's the first thing they think off when they type in an address. I know when I first heard about Slashdot, I tried slashdot.com first, then slashdot.net, and finally slashdot.org. And under your proposed idea, it might be slashdot.linuxnerds or something. And I'd have never guessed that. I guess a company could market it good enough (come to amazon.books!) but it won't be the first thing that someone has in mind when they type in an address.
A while ago, I saw a feature story on an evening news show about a restaurant in Scotland called McDonald's. The McDonalds company sued to make the owner change the name, which turned out to be a mistake because the owner was THE McDonald of Clan McDonald, and Scottish law is pretty biased toward his side. McDonalds (the company) backed down pretty quick when they realized he had the power to force THEM to change the name of all their fast food joints (in Scotland), if he so choose.
Just enforce the rules on TLD usage. You're a commercial operation? Any application for a .org name will be denied automatically. Not providing network services to others? Forget getting a .net domain name. Not operating commercially ( eg. an individual or non-profit organization )? No .com for you. Just because the corporations want to pollute the DNs doesn't mean we have to let them. And just to make it harder, put ICANN outside the United States, maybe on one of those South Pacific islands who don't care about politics as long as your checks clear. Let the corporations sue in a country where they're the interlopers and the people they're suing are the locals.
Not to mention that Slashdot isn't a nonprofit organization, and freshmeat isn't a network provider.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Here in Australia they don't let anyone register a domain in the wrong area. You must be a registered business to get a .com.au, a registered network provider (eg isp) to get a .net.au (and there is someones overlap between the last two), or a registered not-for-profit organisation to get a .org.au.
.id.au, which is split up further into names like dropbear.id.au, wattle.id.au, and others. Each one of these subdomains has its own policies as to what they allow and disallow. Some charge, some don't.
For individual names, they have
This system isn't bad, I guess you could do worse.
http://www.id.au/id-au.html for more info.
As long as you're not violating trademark law or extorting somebody domain names should be first come first serve. If an individual registers their surname as a domain name first its theirs, if a company registers their trademark as a domain name first its theirs. If somebody (a corporation, an individual or whatever) registers a domain name which is somebodies trademark and uses it to compete against them then the registrants rights to the domain name should be terminable.
Basically the way it should work comes down to a simple concept: Play fair. The way it presently works is also a simple concept: Carry the biggest stick.
Some years ago, I had a brief acquaintance with a man named Walter Taylor. His family founded the Taylor Wine Company in Hammondsport New York, which was purchased by Pepsi-Cola. They manipulated the law, permitting them to import Algerian wine by the railroad car, and mix it with the legal minimum of New York state grapes and called the resulting garbage "Taylor" New York State wine. Walter founded the Bully Hill Vineyards, which is a small estate bottled wine in Hammondsport. Although he never attempted to use his name in conjunction with the product, Pepsi sued to prevent him using his name anywhere on the bottle. They won; the also lost. Walter's next wine was called "Goat White Wine" and featured an original woodcut of his on the lable of a goat sticking out his tongue. The label read, "they can take my heritage they can take my name but they cant get my goat!" and was signed "Mr. X, the Secret Proprietor of Bully Hill Vineyards." Such is reality.
People are in the mindset of lastname identity.
Heh, the same last name you share with countless relatives and strangers.
There should be a new internet domain hierarchy for family domains, personal web pages, etc (didn't this happen a while ago?). That should fix part of the problem.
I'm really surprised people haven't thought about fixing the problem instead of the symptoms. The web lends itself to hierarchical organization and this isn't taken advantage of as much as it should.
Now for the people who use some big companies name for their website and run some sort of commercial venture... you're on your own. It's part of business to research before you step into possible legal troubles. Counterpoint: you're a big enough company to go after a domain name withlegal muscle... how come you didn't do that a long time ago? You missed the boat.
That said, I also would like to see the littles guys treated as equally as the big companies.
(And squatting is a no-no.)
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Let's see the corps try and stop that! From there I my son can legally get personalized licensed plates, pencils, phone book listings, etc. Muhahahaha!!
One of the big problems with this type of suit is the excessive financial burden of defense. Whether the person wins or not, they typically still have to pay their legal bills.
There have been some high-profile successes against companies in the past (ajax.org, veronica.org, avery.net/dennison.net, etc.), but far more common is the silent, unpublicized acquiescence to business interests. When the defendent is a non-profit interest like ajax.org or veronica.org, public pressure can help avoid the need for a costly legal defense, as when Colgate-Palmolive dropped their suit for ajax.org after receiving a petition from slashdotters.
But for-profit interests don't have it so easy, and there are hundreds of cases currently under dispute or litigation. I've chatted with defendents in the midst of lawsuits whose legal bills are in the $30,000-$50,000 range, with stacks of depositions and other legal papers measuring a meter or two in height. These aren't surname domains, but would normally be considered generic phrases or business names; see http://www.goofoff.com for one example (a chemical company, Lilly Industries, has a trademark for a product called "Goof Off.")
When "victory" means paying $100,000 to keep using the domain name you already "own," accepting defeat from the start is the most attractive option for many individuals and small businesses.
Dude, you can imagine how I feel.
I wanted to register my last name, but this computer company I've never heard of already has it. It totally stinks.
Jonathan Apple
aka
It seems to me that these problems wouldn't be an issue if people would register domains as they should. The big three top-level domains were created with a specific purpose/market in mind. .com should be registered for corporations and for-profit endevours (.com as in company). .org should be registered or organizations - non-profit, big-name organizations (like the American Cancer Society, Red Cross, etc), as well as the Triange Area Spider Silk Knitting Circle. .net are for network providers - ISPs and those they provide for.
.org and .per(.ind, whatever) would be less expensive (or free, provided you keep up the paperwork), while .com and .net could be more expensive - which companies could afford to pay because they save all the money they're spending now going around suing people for domain names/trademark infringement!
If people would register like this, it would make life far less confusing. As well, it would be nice if people *could* easilly register their local area domain name (ie: mur.rdu.nc.us) or even better, an individual or personal top-level domain address (mur.ind or mur.per or mur.tmd - this is my domain) which was specifically designed for personal web pages. Now, if they did something like this, they cold even stratify domain registration fees depending on the top-level domain you want -
I registered and have been using the name easel.com in good faith; now a company that makes an "easel" line of clothing is disputing my rights to it. Their prior trademark on the word "easel" involves clothing, my site contains art and a children's advent calendar. Does this make sense? More info at easel.com
IANAL, but my father is.
My understanding is that trademarks typically only apply to the specific trade that it is associated with. For example, you might be able to use the term "FooBars", even if it's trademarked by a certain company, if the context you're using it in doesn't create confusion.
There are sometimes exceptions on very well known trademarks like "McDonalds". But I don't think that "Henley" or "Reznor" are very well known trademarks. I've never heard of either of them before.
Besides, these people have a legal right to use their names, unless their name happens to be McDonald and they're using it in the CONTEXT OF A TRADEMARK. The Henley site is a personal site. The Reznor site appears not to be, but I honestly don't think that matters because I doubt that Reznor is selling the same thing as whatever it is that Thomas & Betts sells.
I guess these companies are just hoping that the people won't be able to afford a lawyer to defend the proper use of their names.