This is an interesting story

Interesting because it involves a trademark dispute by the trademark holder against someone who is not a domainer, just an end user, and interesting because the media seems to be unanimously siding with the owners, and against the trademark holder

In a story which has been written about in over 45 publications today,  a father registered the domain narnia.mobi for his son  and gave it to him  for  his 10th birthday to use  as an e-mail address.

Seems as the father who is a poet and him and his son were big fans of C.S. Lewis, who wrote the “Chronicles of Narnia”.

C.S. Lewis Ltd owner of the trademark and copyright to C.S. Lewis’s literary works plus the narnia.com website filed a 128 page WIPO action claiming that the father bought the Narnia address “in bad faith” adding: “the domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights”.

However the owner of the domain Mr Saville-Smith said “he would refuse to be bullied. Taking this huge 128-page legal action is clearly intended to scare us into handing over something we have that they want just because they say so and are a big firm of lawyers with an extremely rich client, and not because they are in the right.”

Mr. Smith further said “We’ve never made any money out of this domain and have no interest in doing so”

The articles further quote Mr. Smith as saying:

We don’t have the money to hire intellectual property lawyers, so we’re saying ‘help’. One thing for sure is that our response won’t be 128 pages long, it will be more like 10 pages – we’re looking at quality rather than quantity.”

“If the WIPO decides in favor of the C.S. Lewis estate, that would be the end of it for us. However, I don’t expect they will, because their case is flimsy and we’ve done nothing wrong.

As I said this story has now reached 45 publications around the world in about 12 hours.

Each article seems to be phrased in a way where the trademark holder is seen as picking on the domain holder.

Some of the articles even point out that the .mobi registry, like all TLD’s. had a period that trademark holders could have applied for their .mobi but this trademark holder did not and therefore the domain was available for registration.

Certainly none of the articles refer to Mr. Smith as a “cyber criminal” or any such terms that CADNA loves to use against anyone who owns a domain that maybe subject a trademark.

Like I said, interesting how the press is handling this story.

One final note, the domain narnia.mobi goes to a sedo parking page, with the first link on the page going to disney.

Interesting.