RE: UKNM: Help with domain dispute?

[Lee Bryant]

Hi John,


In the absence of any Trademark associated with the Circlemakers "brand" and

given your opponent's goodwill gesture of providing a link to your site it

may prove difficult, though given the success of your .org site you may well

have a case for the suspension of the .com domain until resolution is

reached.


It's no consolation, but at least in this case the offending domain is

actually being used rather than warehoused. We recently tried to acquire

names for an on-line learning project only to find that a small but

far-sighted ISP in the north-east of England had bought up just about every

combination of "learning" we could think of. Their lowest offer for one of

these names was �60k although they clearly had no intention of using it

themselves. I find it despicable that despite the recent thrust of

government policy towards promoting on-line learning and training, genuine

learning organisations find that their natural domain space does not exist

because some snotty-nosed techie in or around Sunderland thought it would be

a wheeze to warehouse all the names.


Surely such parasitic business practices have no future in our revolutionary

new [media] age ;-)


Lee Bryant

TMG Hypermedia

----------------------------------

http://www.tmg.co.uk

----------------------------------

Tel: +44 (171) 207 2050



-----Original Message-----

From:

ownerchinwag [dot] com

 [

ownerchinwag [dot] com]On">mailto:ownerchinwag [dot] com]On

 Behalf Of John

Lundberg

Sent: 29 June 1999 16:15

To:

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

Subject: UKNM: Help with domain dispute?



Hi,


I run http//www.circlemakers.org the home of England's crop circle makers

which has been online since 1995. I need some advice about my legal

position re the domain name http://www.circlemakers.com which has recently

been registered to promote a book about crop circle makers [that's us!].

It's just a holding page at the moment but I was gutted when I found out as

I was planning to buy the domain, but this guy got there before me. I've

offered to buy the domain back off of him but he doesn't want to sell.


The point is, I've spent five years building the circlemakers 'brand' both

online and offline, in traditional media such as the NBC-TV and BBC Country

File documentaries that were recently made about us.


Annoyingly, the media often give out the wrong URL for our site [ .com

instead of .org - see the current issue of Internet Magazine for the most

recent example :/ ]. The owner of circlemakers.com has now put up a note

about our site and a link, but it's a small consolation.


Do I have any legal recourse to reclaim the domain? Obviously I don't own a

trademark for the word but I think I could put up a very strong claim for

the domain.


Can anybody help?


Or have I just been shafted!?! If large corporations can claim back their

domains, isn't it time that individuals are given the same rights???


Later,

John


 john lundberg:                   developmental:

johndevelopmental [dot] co [dot] uk (mailto:johndevelopmental [dot] co [dot] uk)

  http://www.developmental.co.uk

 tel:       +44 (0) 171 249 3172  fax:      +44 (0) 870 054 8748


 [   for too long creation has been a slave to rational time   ]


********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html