Archive: July, 2010

Recently  Overstock.com, paid $350,000 for “O.co”name. The president of Overstock, justified the price by the possible opportunities that a one letter domain could represent.

Currently, O.co redirects users to Overstock.com.

Many companies have complained that it has been difficult to find a good .com address, and some are using the launch of the .co domains as a band aid for their fruitless searching for an alternative.

In addition, most registries have strict bans on less than 4 letter domains for many legal and technical reasons; the fact that .co seems to be unconcerned with these problems, makes it seem to be “new thinking”.

One fact that many overlook is that the slick new marketed URL, .co, is just the Internet country code for Colombia. It has been around for years, prior to the current marketing trick, and no one really seemed to notice before.

Consider that new or old, the extensions can be confusing.

When the CCTLD naming conventions were being held, Scotland overlooked the importance and as a result .sc is for “Seychelles” and Scotland has no unique cctld.

No one ever said that the internet was fair. If they did, they probably should be shot.

I would like to say that Facebook is in the news again, but if we are honest, we should probably say that it never left.

This week the actual ownership of the Social Media giant was challenged in court by Paul D. Ceglia, who claims to have financed the original Facebook site for $1000.

In the complaint filed in New York, Mr. Ceglia essentially states that he paid Mr. Zuckerberg $1000 in 2003 to build a website named “TheFacebook”.

The sketchy details alleged that the current owner of “Facebook”, Mr. Zuckerberg, agreed to give Mr.Ceglia 50 percent ownership in the website named “TheFacebook, with an additional one percent of the company for every day that passes beyond January 1, 2004, where the agreed upon website remained unfinished.

The “TheFacebook” site in question was completed on February 4, 2004; this timeframe would give Mr. Ceglia approximately 84% ownership in return for his patience if we adhere to the letter of the supposed agreement.

Will they adhere to that agreement, and what could this mean to Facebook?

This week Toyota lost an important intellectual property decision with regard to how trademarks are used, and in a way, we all lost some protection against the bad guys.

Recently, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in favor of an authorized Lexus dealer to use the word “Lexus” as part of its domain nameunder “fair use”.

Previously, this ability to use Lexus was prohibited in an earlier decision.

I have written previously about fair use, but mostly in favor of the trademark holder. This time the decision has benefitted the other side of the argument; not the TM holder, and not those of us in the enforcement industry.

In this case the judge upheld the idea that “Lexus” is being used to literally describe a product or service that is being sold or serviced at the location in question.

To the judge in this case, it was the very definition of fair use.

Lisa and Farzad Tabari, who own Fast Imports, initially lost their domain names; buy-a-lexus.com and buyorleaselexus.com in 2003 under the legal protection against customer confusion, on behalf of Toyota.

The answer is that they are all in the news this week around the recently beleaguered social media site;

Facebook.

The big news is that Lady Gaga passed President Barack Obama with the number of fans on Facebook. In

reaction to hearing this news, Lady Gaga went to Twitter to thank her 4,796,663 Twitter fans for the honor.
However, she then promptly thanked her actual 11,065,406 Facebook friends as well.

President Barack Obama, has approximately 9,999,092 fans on Facebook and pop star Justin Bieber hit 6.7

Million Facebook fans this week. Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has passed 20 million fans, Michael Jackson, even

deceased has over 15 million fans and the game Mafia Wars has also more than10 million fans.

For comparison on the social media site Twitter, Britney Spears is at approximately 5,278,864 followers,

Ashton Kutcher is at approximately 5,204,397 and President Obama is at approximately 4,476,497

followers. Justin Bieber’s Twitter account is now at 3.5 million followers this week and rapidly growing.

However not everyone is a “fan” of social media, or more correctly how it is being used.

Canadian lawyer Tony Merchant has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook for letting users’