What kind of legal rights do you have as far as web site titles are concerned?? I run a website called ultimate gamer forums and tonight i came across ANOTHER ultimate gamer forums. This other site is alot newer than mine, (and not nearly as good ;-) ). Unfortunatly he comes up on google right next to me when ultimate gamer forums is searched.. I feel this could cause some confusion among message board users online... I have been running UGF for over 3 years now, and have ultimategamerforums.com registered.. Ive written the guy and respectfuly requested that he change the name, but if he decides he doesent want to, what kind of actions can I take?? Im thinking since ive had ultimategamerforums.com registered, I can prove that Ive had the title before him if i had to plead a case to someone. But i dont know who to go to about this..
Sounds like NESworld vs. NESLand. I can't help though I don' know alot about it but Nissan sued a guy who's family surname is Nissan for registering nissan.com for his family website.
It is actually nissan computer company... if you go to nissan.com it talks all about what your talking about. I dont see how nissan car company has the right to do this... Nissan computer company got the URL first and they legitimatly use it because the guy's name is nissan.. Nissan car company needs to just fuck off... They should have registered the URL first, and they missed that boat... oh well... just because they are a bigger and more well known company does NOT make them more entitled to the URL...
Welcome to the world of copycat and one off spelling sites. www.wbay.com www.payapal.com Just get used to it, and be sure to buy the rights to all of your .net and .org urls.
I highly doubt wbay.com is a copycat or one off spelling site. It's a local ABC news station (covering Green Bay, Wisconsin) that has probably been around way longer than eBay.
The answer is you can't do much. Assembler is right, though. If you want to be, say, Gamer Forum, then you'd buy.... gamerforum.com gamerforum.net gamerforum.co.uk gamer-forum.com gamer-forum.net gamer-forum.co.uk etc. Unfortunately, this is more expensive, of course!!
Can you copyright a name? Or can you only make them trademarks, which probably means you need to be a business...
You can try to sue the guy, but good luck. That would problably be more trouble than it's worth. The way it works I think is that if you have a tradmarked name and someone registers a domain that is obvisouly your name, then you get precedence ala "cybersquatting." Like if you are McDonalds, and somebody registes mcdonalds.com as a way of balckmailing money from you, you can sue him to get ownership. But if his name happens to be mcdonald, and it's a legitimate site then you have no recourse. There was a case in 1999 with Earth.com, and this company called Earth shoes who claimed they owned the word "Earth." They lost. Of course, you could go over to his forums and just spam them and make them suck so he gives up. On your site, change it to "the REAL Ultimate Gamer Forums."
Nah... im not changing anything about my site... My site has been around for years... And his is pretty pathetic and is of no real threat, I just resent that when someone types in "ultimate gamer forums" on google, 2 different ones come up.. The site is pretty much abandoned. I did leave a message that made it sound like he was infringing on a copyrighted name and possible legal action could take place. But I dunno... the site will probably just go away in a few weeks, because it really is abandoned..
