Alphecca

Eminent Domain on the Web

I like this story from Out-Law.Com:

British insurer elephant.co.uk has lost an attempt to capture elephant.com from a Canadian who uses it for his web site about elephants and who had indicated that he would sell the name if the offer price was over $1 million.

Elephant.co.uk is a brand of Admiral Insurance Services, fronted at the web site by a cartoon character called Trunkie. The brand makes millions from selling cheap car insurance over the web. But the owner of elephant.com, Adam Dicker from Ontario, told an arbitration panel that he had never heard of the British business.

[...]

He said that until he received the complaint he had not been aware of any company using the word elephant as a brand of insurance. His previous communications with Oberwager and Admiral had made no mention of the term. He said that as soon as he knew of the possible infringement he had removed the insurance ads and replaced his original content.

The site, he argued, was therefore being operated in good faith.

Admiral disagreed, producing evidence showing that the site was still generating insurance adverts. On the elephant.com homepage at the time of writing, Google AdSense displays one advert for insurexyz.com, headed "WWF Save the Big Cat" and linking to a page on insurexyz.com's site that promotes pet insurance. Dicker pointed out that he has no control over the ads that Google AdSense displays on his site.

He also argued that Adsense sometimes generates different adverts for the same web page, depending on the internet protocol (IP) address of the person viewing the page, so that UK viewers see different adverts to those from Canada. Dicker had had no idea insurance adverts were being shown in the UK, he said.

Dicker reasoned that if AdSense is linking to competitors of Admiral, that is a matter for Admiral to raise with Google, not him.

The three-man WIPO panel agreed, finding that Admiral had not proved bad faith on the part of Adam Dicker. The panel refused to transfer the domain.

Now, if these guys want to buy Alpheccca.com, I'd entertain a six-figure offer; I'm not greedy...