Lost in this overview (and I couldn't really tell the point of the overview) are the probably 10 000 + people per year who go to this site by mistake. It's odd to me that Nissan didn't just offer him those 7 figures worth of legal fees and solve it (or maybe they did to no effect)
I've actually met the guy and did some contract work for him. After hearing the story from his mouth, what stuck with me is his utter dislike for the Nissan CEO and Arabs. He seemed very passionate about Israel and cited Nissan's Arab CEO as a huge part of why he dislikes that company.
If I understand badclient correctly, the (alleged) attitude of M. Nissan towards Arabs and Israël comes from his problems with M. Ghosn. I'm just saying that if it's the case, it make no sens.
I suspect they initially thought they could just bully the guy. By the time they understood he actually was on solid ground (it was the 90s, lawyers didn't know anything about our intertubes), it was too late: smallbiz owners like Mr. Nissan can be the hardest mofos once they get personal. I bet he's still proud he didn't accept their offers.
It's old news anyway, very well-known. I'm always surprised when stuff like this comes up on news sites, I tend to forget the web is full of goddamn kids these days ;)
Exactly. My first thought whenever this topic comes up is why a company that big simply can't make him an offer he couldn't refuse. Maybe he's stubborn or something but I have to take the little guy's side here.
Maybe they should get nissan.co lmao. Wait, nissan.co leads to Mazda. Hmm, it's not immediately clear to me what the relationship between nissan and mazda is.
Edit: nevermind, it seems to take you to a random car related destination. After checking it out further the dntx.com domain takes you to mazda first, then some other car search site, then finally a site with an empty template.
Who is the bully? Squatters are just taking advantage of their advantage of the internet to loot someone else's brand, similar to patent trolls. Two sides to every story.
How many of those people actually decided to buy a Toyota because the Nissan site didn't load on the first try? I think people overestimate how much a domain name matters.
> a final injunction which allowed Nissan Computer Corporation to maintain control of the domains Nissan.com and Nissan.net so long as it neither advertised nor mentioned/made disparaging comments about Nissan Motor.
First thing I see on nissan.com is a massive "Nissan's motor lawsuite against us" with crossed Nissan logos and "it could happen to you too", then a massive ad below this. Doesn't Nissan have a case that not only he doesn't respect his side of the bargain but he's obviously using Nissan's popularity for his own benefit?
No. He no longer has to refrain from posting or linking to disparaging remarks about Nissan.
"Injunctive relief may not restrain Nissan Computer from placing links on nissan.com and nissan.net to other sites that post negative commentary about Nissan Motor; to this extent, the relief granted is overbroad, reaches non-commercial speech, and runs afoul of the FTDA and the First Amendment."
Mr. Nissan used to run a small computer shop in the 90s. He's pretty old school guy who's had to hire shit load of developers over the years for various pages of the site. I was hired at one point to fix an issue with their contact form.
Not significantly simpler. I'd imagine that the module that parses malformed HTML into a hierarchy is separate from any rendering-related behavior. EDIT: But I'd love to be proven wrong.
It is, probably, the stupidest pagination scheme i've ever seen.
Though back in the day, I thought using form dropdown lists for page navigation was cool too. Of course I never had 500+ pages either.. and I got over it.
I simply do not understand why Nissan Motorcompany dont just offer the guy a good pile of money.
He has all the rights to use the domain, as its his name, and simply bought it first.
That or spend millions and a decade on lawsuits that lead nowhere...
Ah, right, so the decisive factor of the GP is not whether the guy is running a legitimate business, it's whether the guy is using the domain to mislead people into thinking he's Nissan cars.
So, for example, a personal site with a few family photos of someone called Nissan, or whose nickname is Nissan, or who just liked the word, would not be infringing, so they couldn't take it away, correct?
Correct. They couldn't take it away, but (like Nissan Motors tried) they could make it financially difficult for you to keep it.
Now, if Mr. Nissan started doing something like setting up a car forum and reviews on his site, he would get into very dangerous territory.
Right now (at least for me) nissan.com has an advertisement for an insurance agency that sells car insurance. I would say that is about as close as Mr. Nissan can come to blurring the line to car.
> So, for example, a personal site with a few family photos of someone called Nissan, or whose nickname is Nissan, or who just liked the word, would not be infringing, so they couldn't take it away, correct?
They could if they could convince the UDRP panel that the "personal site with a few family photos" is just a sham and the the domain holder's true intention is to extort as much money as possible from Nissan.
I'm willing to believe a small fraction of the amount they subsequently spent on legal fees would, if offered at the beginning instead of threats, have been more than enough....
A friend of mine operated a movie review site that mentioned Netflix in the name. Netflix sued him, but settled out of court by having him change the name, and buying the original domain for a few thousand dollars. They then let the domain expire.
Since Nissan is the only major international company unable to acquire their first choice of domain, it appears an outlier. The lesson perhaps is that the market, coupled with the dispute resolution system, works well with respect to web domains.
The article inexplicably fails to mention if Nissan [car company] ever simply offered up a large amount of money to transfer over the domain. It's pretty human nature to dig in when you are attacked.
It would be interesting to know how the process would go - if he just accepted an offer, then Nissan might take him to court saying he was squatting on the name. Or he might be OK if they approached him first. IANAL.
How much traffic do you think they actually lose by not having Nissan.com? I would have thought as soon as someone looking for Nissan cars visits that URL, they would realise it was not the right site, then try the ccTLD version i.e. Nissan.co.uk, or simply search "Nissan" in their search engine of choice.
It's a bit like Google AdWords - some choose to bid on their own brand keywords, but are they actually gaining incremental visitors, or just spending budget on acquiring traffic that would otherwise arrived for free anyway?
Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. was founded in 1934. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motor_Company#Nissan_Mot...
And the word "Nissan" was used before that as a stock market abbreviation in Japan. The name Nissan, however, was probably not well-known outside of Japan. Mr. Nissan had probably never heard of the company. He was first to register the domain name, and presumably Nissan "the company" had the same opportunity at the time. But it is disturbing to read comments such as this on a page (http://www.digest.com/people/page_1.shtml) linked to from his home page:
"Mr. Nissan,
I congratulate you, and thank you, for your perseverance in standing up for what is honorable and legitimate, for each of us and our children.
NMC's attempt to leverage their size and importance (as it is the Asian way), will not be tolerated.
I will post your information for everyone I know to read and boycott their products."
Boycott! Wow.
After reading several such posts, I wonder if the posters realize that Nissan has factories in the U.S.
Someday, I speculate that the current nissan.com will be subject to a cyber attack in a case of mistaken (or "mistaken") identity. What goes around, comes around.
So, while Mr. Nissan has the rights of "first dibs," he should realize that real damage is being done, and that he is fanning flames that do not speak to the "better angels of our nature."
[Edit: Looks like the parent was deleted. The comment was noting how the site is poorly marketed, and that this led the commenter to think it was a fake business.]
Clicking through the website, I don't find it unbelievable that this is a DIY website of a local computer shop. There are tons of small business websites like this out there, and while they don't inspire a sense of legitimacy in people unfamiliar with their store front, it's not a problem for those that are.
Well, that was my first impression anyway. There's an address on the website that points to a residential area, not a commercial area. If the was an actual storefront they probably wouldn't do that: http://goo.gl/qkT4l (maps.google.com). Still, if the website is bringing in enough money to live on, a lot of small website owners tend not to keep up with current best practices, and the site was created in 1994. It looks to be of its era, I would say.
"Clicking through the website, I don't find it unbelievable that this is a DIY website of a local computer shop."
Works better than quite a few small UK PC shop Web sites! I'm determined to buy what will probably be my last desktop (simply because of the increasing utility of laptops/tablets) soon[1] and would like to buy one from a small business locally.
Good heavens, they all need to find undergraduates who will code for parts or something! I suppose if you are running the business and the Web site generates sales, you just leave it ticking...
[1] soon=when gas/phone/water/sewage/council tax bills paid but before they all get locked down and limited to vendor OS.
Its just a small website of a guy running a computer shop.
Sure hes monetizing on the Nissan brand name, but wouldnt you do the same if they run multi-million dollar lawsuits against you for 10+ years to get your domain? And all that while you just bought it first, before they even had the idea to and its your legal last name ?
All the people who go to "nissan.com" looking for info about their car and having to spend more time finding the site, while small for each person, add up to a lot of wasted time in total. All for an insurance ad. Taking the web owners rights out of the equation, it seems like a misuse of the domain. Yes, I get how he bought it first, but it just seems wrong.
Correct. My feelings on this were basically: It's a shame that the domain could be put to a greater use. The owner could utilize it better. But under no circumstance would I say that he as the owner couldn't do what he wanted.
It looks like it was created in FrontPage 98. That said, the buttons on the left work and he is actually running a small business selling computer products and services (such as programming @ $90/hr).
I was trying to negotiate a deal with him to advertise my consulting services on his site. We also bounced ideas about turning the domain into something more meaningful.
Used to work for a credit card company, MBNA. They wanted mbna.com, which was owned by Mercedes Benz, North America. Not so amazingly enough, hand Mercedes a million or so and voilà we now had mbna.com, and why Mercedes is now mbusa.com.
MBNA is a horrid credit card company. They love mandatory
arbitration clauses; that always favored that shitty
company. I will be glad to eventually write them off
in BK court.
What was the situation with Dodge? I can remember in the early-late 90s (heh, 1997is?) that dodge.com belonged to some financial group. The actual Dodge car company had 4adodge.com, I believe.
This post is clickbait with basically zero content. The story of Nissan.com is well known to anyone who's been around the web for long. After all the battle started in the '90s.
This article is saying "The web is important! Nissan Motor Company wants to own nissan.com!"
I found it very informative, I mean Wikipedia[1] only gives a scant 140-ish word overview of the subject (and basically the same thing on the page for Nissan Computer itself), and though it does give 3 references, 2 of those are PDF's from the court judgements and the 3rd is an expired link to the USPTO. Oh yeah, Nissan.com[2] actually contains the most information, though it looks biased and sensational (to be expected). Otherwise, I'm not finding just a whole lot of recent information about this out there. I see a Wired article from 2001, and a Salon article from 2002, but other than that the chatter is few and far between.
Meanwhile, the site that OP's article was posted on is "the course website for the suite of law & technology courses at Yale University offered by Elizabeth Stark and Brad Rosen" (which is apparently CPSC 183, 184, 185 at Yale University). Publish date of the piece was 2011. So as far as sources go, I'm not sure how much better you could get than this. Not even a single ad, and right under 500 words, which is a nice size for a short take on the subject.
"Hey did you know Nissan Motors doesn't own nissan.com?"
"They don't? Wow."
Everything about it is obvious. It's providing no content. The fact that the site has no ads and is made by reputable people means nothing. It's still just an old (and very simple) story with no new information or insight added.
The reason you're not finding much/anything out there is like I said this story started in the '90s, everybody already knows about it except people who weren't around then, and even so, there's not much to tell.
Ok so great you missed it, maybe you were sick that week. But it was all over in the late 90s and early 00s, and there's no new developments and no new insight in this post.
