When Good Albertans Go Bad
Tom’s pissed and there’s a wily batch of Albertans [which I'm not a part of I might add] that are to blame.
You see Tom’s beloved domain name http://tomcruise.com/ has been hijacked…well the actual term for the move is cybersquatting. It was a popular ploy in the early days of the internet when a lot of big companies and trademark owners were slow off the mark to stake their claim on the web.
So individuals and some companies made a business of registering these names and trying to profit from the traffic of people searching for the brand or trademark. In extreme cases they even tried to sell the names back to the rightful owners for large sums of cash.
In Tom’s case…and many other celebs his name was scooped up by a group called “Alberta Hot Rods.” If we take a look at the registration info for tomcruise.com:
Domain ID: D3129785-CNO
Domain Name: tomcruise.com
Domain Name IDN: tomcruise.com
Registrant Name: Network Operations Center
Registrant Organization: Alberta Hot Rods
Currently if you visit http://tomcruise.com/ you’ll find a dead page, but for that last while what the hot rodsters have done it redirect that traffic to their celebrity fan site: http://www.celebrity1000.com.
Now the Alberta Hot Rod group didn’t just pick on Tom. The following is a partial list of other celeb domain names that were bitten [with links to the trial documents]:
All of these cases the Hot Rods were defeated but they did have one surprising, even stunning, victory:
A battle for ownership of the domain name ‘alberteinstein.com‘ has resulted in a surprising defeat for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr Einstein bequeathed most of his property and rights to the University, including the valuable right to control the use of his name or likeness. The University operates a website at www.albert-einstein.net where information about the famous scientist can be found but it objected to the registration and use of the disputed ‘dotcom’ name by Alberta Hot Rods of Canada.
That’s right, the Alberta Hot Rods own the rights to the domain alberteinstein.com despite the fact that Albert gave the rights to his name to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Now this method of doing business does kind of get my blood boiling, but I also remember Rich Dad’s list of things that were necessary to do well in business…and one of them was knowledge of the law.
If you’re going to play in the Wild West environment of the internet [where at least now there are starting to be some laws] you’d better spend some time at least learning the basics and be prepared with a lawyer or two in your back pocket if necessary.