RE: UKNM: Domain Name Theft

[Greg Baker]

I seem to remember a few years ago, a bunch of larger companies put a

legal case into action against people doing just this. The result went

something along the line of: if you had say MacDonalds Hairdressing of

Atlanta USA, then you'd be perfectly entitled to MacDonalds.com and

buying it from them would cost in effect what the owner demanded.

However if you are just holdng the domain name then the court in effect

provided a "reasonable" sum, which came to a few hundred dollars.

The advice I remember after this was to offer the reasonable sum for the

URL, that way if you have to get heavy, the sum is already on paper, and

you've made an obvious effort to provide recompense for whatever it took

them to net the name.


Hope this is of use.

Sorry that I can't be more specific but this was a long time ago in the

dawn days when I was a hack.


Greg Baker

Creativer Director

Deep Need Technology.


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

From: Charles Meaden [

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

]

Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 1999 4:34 PM

To:

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

Subject: UKNM: Domain Name Theft



Apologies to anyone if this seems a little old hat, but I hope someone

can

clarify the current situtation on domain names


We were in the process of registering a domain name for a well known

company, when through bad luck another company pipped us to the post.

The

domain name is a name 'unique' and could only apply to our client.


We have approached the company that registered the domain name to find

out

what their intentions are, and they hinting that they will sell the

domain

name for a price.


Is this legal and is there anything we can do about it?


Regards


Charles Meaden


===========================================================

Digital Nation (UK) Ltd    http://www.digitalnation.co.uk

          Intelligent Internet Marketing Solutions

        Charles Meaden            Managing Director

Tel: +44 (0)181 864 5420        Fax: +44 (0)181 864 2467

===========

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

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