Blog entry
A couple from Edinburgh and Baker & McKenzie, lawyers for the CS Lewis estate, are caught up in an intellectual property dispute.
Mr Richard Saville-Smith and his wife purchased Narnia.mobi along with TheQueen.mobi and USPresident.mobi for fun in September 2006. They decided to give Narnia.mobi to their son, a CS Lewis fan, as a birthday present for his 11th Birthday. It would coincide with the release of the new film, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and was intended for use as a cool email address (@Narnia.mobi) for his mobile phone.
Unfortunately their fun idea for a birthday gift turned very sour. This month the couple received a 128 page legal complaint filed with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), requesting they surrender the name. The domain has now been frozen until the decision has been made on a possible hearing at the World Intellectual Property Organisation headquarters in Geneva.
The .mobi domain name was not registered by CS Lewis’s estate during the three month sunrise period. Sunrise periods are put in place when a new top level domain is released. It is a way to allow companies and organisations to register domains featuring their trademarks before they are made available to the public. Richard Saville-Smith bought the domain after the expiration of this three month sunrise period.
Mr Richard Saville-Smith and his wife Gillian are refusing to surrender the domain name and are willing to do battle with the lawyers to keep it.
An interesting story, was it just a simple case of forgetfulness that CS Lewis’s estate failed to register the domain during the sunrise period? If this was not the case, then in my opinion the sunrise period becomes a bit pointless if large companies and corporations are just going to send their legal team after legitimate registrants. Surely it would be more cost effective to employ staff to keep up to date with the launch of new top level domains, while ensuring they register them during the allotted time of the sunrise period, than spending a fortune on legal representation to go after the little guys.
So, I wonder how many other companies out there have not registered their domains during sunrise periods? It is worth thinking about your business domain name, make sure to register different variations of it and register your name with any new domain extensions that become available in the future.
