International Law

Surprising win for MySpace in domain name dispute

The Guardian reports on a win for MySpace:

MySpace has won the right to have the MySpace.co.uk domain name despite another firm having registered it six years before the social networking website launched.

The ruling, by domain registry Nominet's dispute resolution service, has caused controversy in the industry because Total Web Solutions of Stockport registered the myspace.co.uk name in 1997, long before the US social networking website launched.

"This dispute resolution service decision is counter-intuitive at first sight and serves as a warning that domain registrations are not guaranteed and need to be secured by pro-active management as well as a clear understanding of the dynamic nature of the industry," said Jonathan Robinson, the chief operating officer at web services company NetNames.

However, the ruling, made by independent expert Antony Gold, found that while myspace.co.uk had initially been used to offer email services and mini-websites to subscribers it had changed its model to exploit MySpace's popularity.

TWS started to use the myspace.co.uk address to lead to a "parked" web page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace.

The arbitrator decided that this was evidence of abusive registration, that TWS was profiting unfairly from the association with MySpace.

MySpace.co.uk was awarded to News Corporation-owned MySpace as a result.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).