What’s in a name? Apparently, a lot for stars like Pierce Brosnan.
Brosnan recently won his case against “cybersquatter” Jeff Burger for the rights to the domain name www.piercebrosnan.com.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ruled that Burger had taken the domain name in “bad faith,” claiming he had intent to make money from Brosnan’s fame. The ruling is reasonable. Burger’s site doesn’t even have a reference to Brosnan.
Domain names exist to allow Internet users to connect the address with the content of the site. However, the “bad faith” policy has potential for abuse.
Some famous personalities feel that they have a special claim to their name. Spike Lee felt that the network name SpikeTV-“the first television network for men”-was an exploitation of his name. Such a claim is ludicrous, given that Lee’s name is a common English word. Furthermore, it’s a word often associated with masculinity. While many people name their male dogs Spike, myself included, the name is rarely applied to females.
The singer Sting also filed a similar suit several years ago over a Web site. He claimed that his fame gave him exclusive rights to the word sting.
While both Sting and Spike failed in their attempts, the suits cost money and time, causing harm to those rightfully using the common English words sting and spike.
Stars can avoid problems like these by keeping their last names. Pierce is as common a word as sting or spike (after all, it’s what stings and spikes do), but Brosnan won his case. He was not trying to prevent others from using a common English word, but his unique whole name.
Jeff Burger was acting in bad faith, but the fact that he was trying to make money is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the site is www.piercebrosnan.com, and the “com” part stands for commercial.
Since making money is the purpose of such sites, it is not reasonable to deny anyone a dot com site because they intend to make money from the site. There are plenty of alternative domain suffixes available, for instance, .net and .org.
Finally, the name of a Web site is becoming less and less relevant.
Today, the Internet savvy rarely try to find a site on dog breeding by typing in www.dogbreeding.com. They are much more likely to look up “dog breeding” on a search engine site such as Google. With search engines, it’s not the name but the content and popularity of the site that counts. Once they’ve found the site, they do not need to remember the site name because they can bookmark the page in their browser. Also, they may have reached the site through hyperlinks, or by those annoying AOL keywords.
Of course, not everyone is ‘Net savvy, and typing in random domain names can provide some entertainment while ignoring homework at 3 a.m. Even so, the domain name is not the only way of advertising the content of the site.
Pierce Brosnan’s case against Jeff Burger was reasonable, but many such cases are ridiculous. WIPO, or any organization asked to consider questions of name ownership, must be careful to consider the disputes case by case.
The content of a Web site must reasonably match the usage of the domain name to preserve the utility of the words. However, words, being a fundamental part of language, must be as open as possible to all in the interest of free transfer of information.
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].