Mid June Doug talked about a family in Scotland who were being sued over the domain name Narnia.mobi by the estate of CS Lewis.
Well news comes out today that a verdict was reached, and the poor little boy will lose his domain name.
The arbitrator ruled that Saville-Smith “registered and is using the disputed domain name in bad faith.”
Towns, a Texas trademark specialist, said he was not convinced Saville-Smith had not aimed to make money from narnia.mobi by allowing it to be linked to commercial sites. Saville-Smith denied this.
Now before people start gathering pitchforks and torches aimed at big money corporations, I have to say I side with the Lewis Estate on this.
The original defense was that they bought the domain innocently, hoping to give it to their son to make a fan website and be able to use the extension as his email address. So immediately the Lewis Estate is painted up as the badguys. You can’t take away this little boy’s birthday present. Futhermore, the domain is publicly available. If it belonged to someone else, they couldn’t buy it right??
But this was not the case. This domain name was bought TWO YEARS AGO and they did nothing with it. There are certain provisions on internet registration that consider this “squatting” Sitting on a domain name you scooped up hoping that the people who you anticipate would really WANT that domain name would pay you for it.
For instance, Michael J Fox wanted his website to be MichaelJFox.com but some Fox fan already owned it. Sorry Mikey. That guy got it first and he is legitimately using the domain. Fortunately for Fox, the uber fan named his price of a face to face meeting with his idol and gladly handed the domain name over no charge.
But after careful consideration, this is not what the family intended with this domain, and with evidence like another website registered by the boy’s father that exploited the popularity of the case (hosting advertising links) showed that the domain was not purchased in good faith. And the judge sided that their intentions were to get financial gain from the site.
The case is expected to be appealed, but I would imagine it will have the same result.
