Return of the Jedi? StarWars.co.uk bod to fight the Empire (Disney) The owner of StarWars.co.uk has vowed to fight on against Disney after the media giant won control of his domain name. Mark Lewis, chief exec of Abscissa.com, who has held the domain and a number of similar names for 12 years, has appealed a decision by the operator of the .uk namespace Nominet. "I can't believe that over the …
Late 1998 I bought ThePhantomMenace.co.uk and ran a fan site from it for 2 years, but was also linking to toy vendors. Got a lot of traffic and did quite well out of it from the affiliate sales and ad revenue, even reviewing the 'film' for Radio 4 and selling stories on the film to the UK and US press. I never heard anything from Lucasfilm, although I always expected to...I guess they were too busy at the time.
At the same time I also ran StarWarsEmail.com giving people free email addresses - again, heard nothing.
Should Abscissa lose their appeal, I suggest a world wide, social media campaign calling for a boycott of all Star Wars movies and related franchise offshoots and merchandising. Like any other corporate entity, the board of Disney only understand the language of money. If we threaten their bottom line, they will respond.
This is a despicable act by another greedy bunch of corporate scumbags and cannot reasonably be defended given the available evidence.
will never work....
Disney may be the Dark side.. but the dark side is fun...
I have zero chance of boycotting the new film without causing extreme upset to my children, they love star wars, they love the original 3 most, think the prequels are OK, but are enthusiastic about the new film! If they keep up the quality found in the animated Clone Wars & Rebels I think they will have a winner
This is crazy, but it seems to happen quite frequently with domains.
There will be wars across the world with robots and civil wars with domains and websites.....
Here's the issue in this case, the corporations hold the copyright to "StarWars" which even holds grounds with domains, but technically that man has been doing business as: "StarWars.co.uk."
Technically both sides have a legal right to use that, but I would say Mark Lewis does OWN it more since he has used it for business. They are only supposed to take it away if it's parked or sitting around or is a very basic monetized site without any content. It should get looked into and Mark should get it back.
nomsavior.com/blog/category/news
Ok, so, star wars appears to be a franchise owned by a corp. It is a registered trademark, end of story, too bad, the idiot has lost.
Like the arseholes over at Perfect Privacy who, on the back of openvpn make tons of money, managed to take over openvpn.org and fool people into believing it was openvpn they were downloading. No, you cannot use their software to connect to your coporate openvpn server, only their paid for, bogus privacy, service.
This has to stop, next we will see starwars.biz or star.wars, squatters ... you did not write the saga, so why should you be able to fool netizens into thinking you are the official site ?
This has to stop.
Like a HMRC LLC, that would be able to cash checks issued to the HMRC, aka HM Revenue & Customs.
That anybody knowledgeable over here thinks this guy is right makes me go fscking mad!
Personally I do not see any reason why ownership of a trademark per se should entitle you to every domain with permutations of that trademark unless the current owner is passing themselves off as the trademark holder. That, to me, is what should enact a forced handover.
If someone is an avid fan of author X with a particular fondness for book Y such that they decide to setup a fan-site based upon name Y, and in no way tries to pretend there is anything official about it, then I do not see why said person should have to forfeit that domain should Y be made into a blockbuster with the trademark owned by bigcorp Z. Yet this is what such judgements would promote. Why should someone be punished for being first to market or, in this case, owning some domains you forfeited?
Here's an idea: if you're bigcorp Z and obtain trademark for Y then best you sort out domains upfront rather than try to strong-arm them later you cheap lazy bastards. To me that is part of your due diligence. Anything you allow to lapse is then fair game.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
