Sony Threatens to Sue for PS2 Domains

pallotta writes "The privately owned Norwegian domains http://ps2.no and http://playstation2.no are threatened with legal action by Sony. They ask the owners of the sites to give up the domain names or (in a letter to the owner of ps2.no) "If we do not receive your letter of confirmation within 10 February 2001, SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) reserves its rights to bring an action against you to recover the said domain name". Full article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten can be found here (in English)."

As bad as Harry Potter

[milgram]

DO these companies understand the PR nightmare they cause?

Not again...

[Xunker]

Arg. I hate this.

Anyway, now that the 275-kilo (roughly) gorilla has stepped in, it looks like, there is no hope for him unless he/she/them/they get creative.

If "Playstation2" is registered as a trademark in Norway, then the "playstation2.no" domain is a given -- Sony will get it and there is no recourse. However, for the "ps2.no" domain, there might be some hope; I somehow doubt that PS2 is a registered trademark as IBM was marketing a PC called the "PS/2" long ago. I realise that is is a lame argument, but you take what you can get.

Not as bad as Harry Potter

[luckykaa]

Not really. If you were looking for information about buying a PS2 in Norway, the first site you try would be playstation2.no or ps2.no.

If you were looking for Harry Potter information, you're not going to try www.HarryPotterFaq.org before HarryPotter.com

IBM

[SlashGeek]

So when does IBM [ibm.com] sue Sony [sony.com] over the "PS/2" designation? I am sick of large corperations acting like they have exclusive rights over everything. This is right on par with Apple [apple.com] stopping an Aqua-like interface for the open source community, after basing their most recent OS on and open source OS. Take, take, take.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Question

[Myselfthethoom]

are the two pages about the PS2 or do they just share the name? I don't speak the language.

3 letter domain names

[JohnnyKnoxville]

I think all 3 letter top level domain names should be considered public domain. Most of the companies with 3 letter names are simply letters standing for the full name, ie: ps2, IBM, AMD. odds are pretty good that somebody would string these 3 letters together eventually anyway in an attempt to get an easy to remember URL. If anything big companies like sony should offer to buy out instead of bullying these people.

Re:Not as bad as Harry Potter

[grahamm]

And if someone asked me about PS2, I would tell them about the International Business Machines microchannel systems. The same ones after which the PS/2 mouse/connector is named.

Re:IBM

[chrischow]

and apple have given back a new BSD varient, various libraries and a QT streaming server back free to the community. what exactly is your point?

Lame in the most significatn of ways.

[DarkKnightRadick]

This is just like CNN (www.cnn.com) sueing this d00d over his website, cnndn.com (http://neirp.com/). Okee, maybe not JUST like that case, but it is similiar. :)

What about sonypsx2.com?

[rappybaby]

Why have Sony never sued the owners of www.sonypsx2.com?

Re:What about sonypsx2.com?

[bryhhh]

What about all the others?

I've just tried 6 ps2.xxx domains, of those 6, the following are not sony sites.

ps2.net
ps2.dk
ps2.org

Also, to add to an earlier post, somebody said that if sony registered ps2 as a trademark in Norway, then they would have rights to the domain, does this mean that if a domain I wanted badly, that was owned by some other hobbyist, that I could claim his domain by registering a trademark of the same name in his country?

This should not be allowed, and I really hope that sony do NOT get to use the ps2.no domain

I do hope however that bad publicity for sony causes their sales to drop. :)