Who Owns Polo?
Nothing has the ability to both bore me and anger me as much as a good old domain name dispute. I don't condone cyber-squatting but people thinking they have the right to any domain containing a seemingly generic term like Polo just doesn't fathom. That's what Ralph Lauren's up to. Take "the sport of kings" and use it as an icon of your clothing range. Then tell people who play the sport they can't use its name. So ridiculous it's laughable. Sorry Mr Lauren but when I think Polo I think of the sport, the mints and the car. Not of your over-priced clothes.
From the article:
Fortunately for Mr Brett, expert guidance is reassuringly close to home: his father, Hugh, is one of the UK's foremost trademark lawyers.
What if people who like to play dominoes want a website. Do they have to worry about "damaging" IBM's product identity?
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Time was when the ACO (the French Automobile Club who own and run the Le Mans 24 hours event) wouldn't let independent Le Mans fans' websites use "Le Mans" in their title or domain name. Odd really when you consider that the event they "own" takes its name from the CITY Le Mans in France. How can you own the name of a city? Were the residents of Le Mans in breach of copyright when including "Le Mans" in their postal addresses? Masquerading as being "official" by using someone's name is wrong, but as you say, many "names" are shared by different organisations and "things" anyway.
IBM might not be too interested in sharing Domino, but, domino's pizza forced a restaurant (top class stuff - hardly your soggy cardboard circle in a cardboard box) in Wallasey to change its name.
Best that we all ljust let this go, you could fill an entire site with this sort of stuff
I agree Andy and wouldn't normally give airtime to it. One company telling another company in the same line of business not to use the same name is fair enough. However, what makes this case so different is that Lauren has taken the name and iconography of a sport and then tried to tell the people who play that sport they can no longer use the name. It's perverse.
Hi,
If you think that kind of sports bashing is bad have your heard about Posh Spice?
She is telling Peterborough FC (I think - whole subject was on the radio the other day) that they cannot use POSH as thier nickname!
Has the world gone crazy?
Peterborough. Don't talk to me about POSH. What's posh about hanging round the bottom of division 2 with the likes of us (Mansfield Town).
Talking of Mansfield Town. Guess who "Team Bath" have got in their historic first round fixture of the FA Cup!? Yep. If we lose I shall never admit to supporting them again...
Jake
Two points. Firstly, yes Paul, the whole world HAS gone crazy. Secondly, quit your whining Jake, we (Bristol Rovers) really miss "hanging around" in the second division. At least second division players can run. And kick the ball. It's horrid down here. I guess that's what we get for being a selling club.
I have every right to tell the Peterborough FC not to use Posh, its my name!! On another note that Jake is hot stuff, I'd even consider dumping my husband who isn't much smarter than the footballs he kicks for Jake!
As both a Domino Developer AND a POSH (Peterborough, not spice) fan, (I know, i know... it could be worse - I could be a train-spotter in my spare time) I think it's dreadful that Victoria Beckham can even think about doing this, especially since we've been called "The Posh" for 80 some-odd years. I don't really think that the dozy spice girl has much of an argument! It was only two or three years ago that she was telling everyone how much she hated being called "Posh" for crying out loud!
She never hated it enough to turn down the merchandising opportunities did she?
I went to IBM in Warwick to see the R6 pre-release blurb they were giving out. Apparently they were not allowed to call it R6 because SAP have the rights on the letter "R"! They had to change it to Notes & Domino 6 or ND6 for short... the world is going mad.
The Victoria Beckham v Peterborough Utd thing has been misreported to some extent. Her objection is against Peterborough using "POSH" for products such as cosmetics (the mind boggles) or even records. If they'd stuck to football related merchandise, she wouldn't have objected. She's still a talentless, dozy bint though. :-)
The really funny thing about all of this is that people invest so much in the domain name, rather than the quality of the site when you actually get there.
I have seen execs agonising over the last detail of a domain name, with no idea about the content they want to publish!
A really good site will get people going back to it time and again, regardless of the domain name or how it is promoted. Ever seen a bus advert for Codestore? Still here though!
well, we could always flood Ralphie's lawyers with e-mails telling them what morons they are. It seems from their lame excuses in the article that they do this (perhaps automatically) to every new domain that contains the string "polo" anywhere in it.
or we could register a domain something like poloclothessuck.com and see what happens.