It would appear that the Internet bullies are still abound in this day and age, now we have the blogosphere to raise some awareness of what can still happen today. A Spanish resident Eduardo Perez Orue, who owns the deusto.com domain name has had it taken offline because a company who registered the ‘deusto’ trademark in 2002 thinks they have the right to a domain name he purchased in 1997. Via the blogosphere many people have added comments to his blog entry informing him of all the in’s and out’s of most of the information this guy will need to take to the WIPO and kick the company attempting this hijack clean back under the rock from where they came.
Having watched over the years many battles over such items I am very surprised that the company involved did not do some serious research before sending the attack dogs after him. I think I can see this domain name case being resolved quite quickly as this guy from what I have read has not put a foot wrong. He has actively used the domain for the past 8 years with reportedly thousands of subscribers. There is an active archive of his site going back to 1997 with over 1250 stories he has had published on the web site. He is not trying to defame the trademark in any way nor is he trying to profit from it by of the misusing the trademark name. This via a people’s army of information that has gone to his rescue is the power of the citizens in my opinion. I will no doubt follow this one via the domain organisations I am involved in. The origin of ‘Deusto’ is that it is a place name in a neighbourhood in Bilbao, Spain. The pirates attempting this claim also go by the name ‘Planeta Agostini’ and are a large Spanish publishing firm. The original site publishes stories from Spanish writers. The publishing industry should know better than this.
Until the WIPO submission is showed to the world and precise details of the case are revealed parts of this will be hard to validate. The only issue I could see that would give ‘Planeta Agostini’ the right to acquire the name would be if all of the writers that had been contributing to this site thought that they were contributing to the ‘Planeta Agosyini’ publishing company.
Links for this post are all with-in Eduard’s post on his current blog. Not being a native Spanish speaker myself I will just sit back and watch as the blogsphere commentates and translates otherwise I will be search translating for the next month. It will be interesting to see what comes from the discussion groups I am involved in at ICANN, APNic and the AUDA, even though there is not much jurastiction for these originastions on the case there usually some very thoughful posts on the subject.
netweb.blog... 