Somebody call a lawyer!
October 17, 2000 8:49 PM   Subscribe

Somebody call a lawyer! Now this is a blatant case of someone ripping off someone else's trademark in a URL if there ever was one. (Courtesy of Hard OCP)
posted by Steven Den Beste (6 comments total)
 
Looking up the WHOIS information on the site shows that whoever owns it, it sure as heck isn't Sega. It seems that somebody's console preferences went a bit too far.
posted by truex at 9:11 PM on October 17, 2000


Haha. Dreamcast is better anyways. At RazerCPL they had a DreamCast and a Ps2 side by side playing Dead or Alive 2.

It was smoohter, looked better, and played better on the DreamCast =)

Damn straight. And I dislike consoles, I dont own one, nor do i plan on it.

As non-bias as yer gonna get
posted by Satapher at 10:10 PM on October 17, 2000


Is it possible that the owner of the site gets some kind of reward from Sega to do this?
posted by Zool at 10:50 PM on October 17, 2000


Companies, including Sega, will give retailers tools to help sell their products including full-color ads, logo's, etc.

So why shouldn't it be cool for an authorized Sega reseller to use the look and feel to sell more units?
posted by Brilliantcrank at 11:56 PM on October 17, 2000


Ok.

I'm not the first person to step up to the plate on this issue. I don't believe corporations should be able to sieze domains *merely* because they match their trademarks.

Editorial sites should be protected, as should incidental uses (the personal site for Bill Ford should not be subject to seizure by FoMoCo). But, there are circumstances.

This guy is explicitly taking commercial advantage of one company's trademark to market it's competitors' products.

No, maybe he shouldn't lose the trademark, but I'd fully support Sony in a dilution suit: he shouldn't be able to *use* the trademark for *this purpose*.

Who makes the call? A real judge, in a real court.
posted by baylink at 7:24 AM on October 18, 2000


Magazines can't call themselves by a trademark without permission. Why should domains be able to?

It's one thing to be sonypsx2users.com, not to mention sonypsx2sucks.com, and another to be sonypsx2.com. The first would be a typical name for a consumer magazine that gets sanctioned use of the trademark. The second might be protected under parody exceptions (questionable), but in any case is a new variant that was not economically viable in the print world. The third, however, is clearly the actual trademark and should be the property of the trademark holder to do with as they like: as an official site, or allowing some other kind of site. Otherwise, Jay's right: it owuld be dilution.

Why is this so hard? Computers are not different from other kinds of media. They only let us have a worldwide audience.
posted by dhartung at 8:48 AM on October 19, 2000


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