Graduate Student Defends Right To Own Chicago2016.com 461
An anonymous reader points to a story in the Chicago Tribune about another domain-name battle. Quoting the article: "As Chicago wages its battle to host the 2016 Olympics, it also finds itself scrapping over a valuable piece of cyberspace: the domain name of Chicago2016.com. The bid team along with the U.S. Olympic Committee are trying to wrest that online address from Stephen Frayne Jr., a 29-year-old MBA student. Frayne snagged it back in 2004, about two years before the bid was launched. ... 'We certainly see Chicago2016.com as the logical default domain for our site, and we believe having someone else control it is misleading for people seeking information about Chicago's bid,' said Patrick Sandusky, a spokesman for Chicago 2016, a moniker protected by trademark."
Looks Legit (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you insane? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, let's start giving out numeric tld's. There's no way that would ever conflict with IP addresses.
Disconcerting. (Score:5, Insightful)
The notion is awfully close to essentially saying that anybody who can't afford a stable of relevant lawyers can have domain names taken at the whim of those who can, which is rather an ugly idea.
guess they should have investigated the trademark (Score:5, Insightful)
a spokesman for Chicago 2016, a moniker protected by trademark.
Awww, isn't it too bad that trademarks don't give you retroactive ownership of whatever you like? Next time, check BEFORE you secure the trademark to see if it's already available. In fact, I bet they did- and just assumed they could take it over, just like how the IOC and USOC shut down everything named "olympic", even stuff that was named because said business was near a (different) Mount Olympus.
Raise your hand if you're completely fed up with the Olympics. Raise your hand if you think it's time that the IOC/USOC-bought legislation "protecting" the Olympic "trademark" was repealed.
Re:Disconcerting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Let's say I participated in a survey from a company attempting to decide on a new product name. (My wife actually does surveys like this, so it's not far-fetched.) Let's also say that some unscrupulous individual notes all the names, then goes to register ALL of them. The company then chooses a name based on the survey feedback, only to find that every one of their choices has been locked out. Does the company have a right to demand their domain back? (Especially if we're talking about made-up words here.) Do they have a right to demand it back if the person starts a "discussion site" on the upcoming product?
You can see the difficulty.
Nearly the same sort of issue happened here. This MBA speculatively registered a whole bunch of (city)(olympic year).com combinations. Unsurprisingly, he got lucky on one of them. Does that make what he did right? Does it make it right because he added a "discussion site"?
Food for thought, anyway.
chicago2016.org (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Corporatism (Score:5, Insightful)
The old rules basically were: if you registered a name first, it was yours, unless it could be construed as misleading or confusing to consumers (i.e., confusing one product for another), based on someone else's EXISTING name.
This might not be the best example, but a rocket and a tennis shoe could both be called "Nike", even though they were otherwise unrelated, because there was little possibility of confusion.
Chicago did not have the name first. If the goddamned business people would have some foresight, they would have grabbed such names when they started thinking about bidding for the Olympics... not years later after someone beat them to it. I do not see where there is any legal principle that says, "We didn't think of it then, but it obviously should be ours, so we want to take it now!"
I call "sour grapes". They fucked up, and now want to take advantage of someone who was smarter than they were. That does not a legal case make. If they want to make money on the name, then grab the name first! Why should they take precedence over someone with more business-savvy then they have?
Re:Disconcerting. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd imagine that pretty much any company doing this sort of thing would be smart enough to snap up the domain names in question before doing that type of market research.
Re:chicago2016.org (Score:2, Insightful)
Semantics are important. .org means that the owner isn't focused on making a buck.
Re:Are you insane? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disconcerting. (Score:3, Insightful)
In my opinion, same deal here. What's that, you have a idea for your city to maybe have a shot at the 20xx games? Go register the domain for $20. Save the hassle later.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they would have a right. You yourself admitted that the Mc-prefix is a common pattern among McDonald's trademarks. In effect, the "Mc" brand itself is their mark. You have no more right to infringe upon their "Mc" mark than I have a right to create a program called "Microsoft Birdhouse". Both instances would be seen as bad faith and an attempt to hang your agenda off someone else's trademark.
There is no "in effect." Trademarks must be registered. "Mc" is not a registered trademark, Microsoft is.
Post above should be modded redundant... Don't know what happened there.
Re:Disconcerting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm.
Datsun became Nissan in 1983. If someone managed to register nissan.com "long before" then, then I say he and his flux capacitor deserve the domain name.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll fix it in post production (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear Marketing Wonks:
The next time you come up with some brilliant idea or name the FIRST thing you should do is perform a domain name lookup to see if your name is already taken. If it isn't then you should register it immediately! Do not wait until you make the presentation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Trying to retroactively take a domain name from some guy who snatched it up because you were too lazy to register it makes no sense. If you have some brilliant idea then chance are there are about 2,000 people out there with the same idea. Cover your ass and do your homework. That is all.
Signed,
The Internet
Re:A fair middle ground solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The IOC or Chicago 2016 should hire this kid. He's clearly quicker than their people, and if he's getting an MBA he's probably qualified to do _something_ in their organization (like "supervise" a project completely outside his realm of competence). Make one of the conditions of his ludicrously high contract payments that he surrenders the domain, everybody wins (except for people who want the Olympics to be about something other than corruption and greed, but that's already a lost cause).
this entire discourse . . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Search vs Domain Name (Score:2, Insightful)
Meh... it's 2008. Who manually types in domain names anymore?
I'll admit, it took me a while to start omitting the "http://www..." part, but as soon as I switched to Firefox, I very quickly gave up on typing out full or even partial domain names. I fully abuse Firefox's "awesome bar" to get me where I want without having to remember whether the site I need used a .org, .cc, .com, or .net, whether there were deliberate misspellings or additional words in the domain name, or other such arbitrary designations.
Here's my point. If you type "Chicago 2016" into a search bar (Firefox uses Google by default), you will find relevant Olympic information *in context*, if not an official website! There is a much lower chance of stumbling onto a misleading page, designed by someone who managed to snag an arbitrary domain name first, because a search will show you a community consensus of what the "real" sites are ("Google bombs" and the like notwithstanding, though they remain an important counter-argument to my case).
Hopefully you already know this stuff, but show it to a non-techie friend or a family member sometime. It'll blow their minds ("Are you hungry? Why don't you type 'Pizza hut' into this bar here...). Plus it'll save you from having to clean all the adware and pornware they would have otherwise got by wandering onto onto the wrong page and clicking one too many false links (try pizzahut.net).
There's no reason to randomly try domain names when half the Internet is already indexed for you. Cybersquatting should be obsolete.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:2, Insightful)
Beijing 2008 [beijing2008.cn]
Interesting that the only example supplied with a link to the appropriate site uses the country TLD. Chicago2016.us [chicago2016.us] was registered in 2006 and looks like it is parked. Maybe they should go after that one first.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:2, Insightful)
Seconded.
And how misleading and stupid is a name like 'squatting'. He's not squatting. He paid for the domain, if anyone's trying to evict him from his property and squat in it are the Olympics thugs.
Brings other kinds of 'creative doubletalk' to mind, such as 'software pirates' and 'liberals' in America.
Re:Sandusky? (Score:2, Insightful)
$comment =~ s/k\s(an.*com)/k\sat\s\1's/
$comment="I could get a great look an MBA by sticking my head up his ass, but I'd rather take Chicago2016.com word for it\n";
print $comment;
$comment =~ s/k\s(an.*com)/k\sat\s\1's/;
print $comment;
gives
I could get a great look an MBA by sticking my head up his ass, but I'd rather take Chicago2016.com word for it
I could get a great looksatsan MBA by sticking my head up his ass, but I'd rather take Chicago2016.com's word for it
Re:Looks Legit (Score:4, Insightful)
*Go to Australia, 4 digit zip codes. Trivia: Sydney has an area with zip code 2000
Re:Small world... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bizarrely (and I'm sure no one will believe this), my friend is working for this particular grad student doing translation for one of his other sites. He does seem to be legitimately trying to build them into actual discussion forums on the pros and cons of the Olympic bid cities.
I believe that. I work in internet marketing company and know MFA (Made For Adsense) along with other kinds of ad-sites pretty well. I expected to see that site coated with AdSense, iSell or something that most people (even most slashdotters, from what I've seen) don't recognize as ads. Pay-Per-Post articles, Tradedoubler text links, etc...
I know that if I had that domain, I could propably have earned some 30k just from this slashdot link alone, no problem. And then all other news sources that must have linked to it? This domain could be used to make A LOT of money. After everything, it could be sold for tens of thousands of more just because it would have massive pagerank.
But what? The site is actually active and has none of these. He can't be just "Waiting and missing 100k profits for some good PR...". If earning money was his main goal, he would either not be waiting or he would be really stupid.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, if the Olympic Committee gave him and inkling of an idea that they might try to wrestle control of the site from him around a month ago, and all of the sudden a site pops up at that address to show that the domain is "in use" in preparation for whatever legal action might come about. Well, let's just say that I'm a bit skeptical. Besides, I haven't met a Kellogg MBA student that wasn't out looking for a quick buck (not that there's anything wrong with that per se), and I've met quite a few. I guess that's an admission of my being biased here. (Fucking Evanstonians)
Re:Looks Legit (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you even go and look at the site? This guy did not know they would definitely want this domain, he wanted to start a site that was for discussion of the economics behind a bid for the Olympics. He's a student at a very good business school and that seems like a perfectly reasonable site for him to have created. Just because you think he wanted it for no good reason doesn't make it so.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Looks Legit (Score:3, Insightful)
And rightly so... .org TLD anyway.
The olympics is supposed to be a non commercial sporting venture, and thus belongs on the
Re:Looks Legit (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a Scottish naming convention, that's where it comes from. Mc or Mac = Son of
McDonald = Son of Donald and exists as the name of a million or so people who have nothing to do with beef patties, or any other form of biological warfare
How can you argue that a word in a language which pre-dates English can become the property of a US corporation to the exclusion of the speakers of that language and/or their descendants
Re:Looks Legit (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear Slashdot admins
This letter is to inform you that your domain slashdot.org infringes on the trademark of our new product line, the Slashdotatron3000(TM). You must surrender all rights to the domain or risk being thrown into a pit of ravenous lawyer.
Scumbag Inc
Re:Once again - two faces. (Score:2, Insightful)
So really, your two face comment makes no sense. This is a case of Slashdotters actually reading the article and looking at the evidence before them instead of automatically crying foul one way or the other.
Re:Looks Legit (Score:2, Insightful)