October 17, 2008
Did you ever wonder how many large companies register their own “sucks” domain names (as in “microsoftsucks.com” or “AIGsucks.com”) in order to prevent someone else from doing so? Like, some unfriendly nasty that wants to use the site to bash the company? How many “CIOs” (“chief information officer,” for the uninitiated; don’t blame yourself if you didn’t know this), wish they had registered variations of their companies’ names before the “gripers” got ahold of them? Many, I suspect. Check out ebaysucks.com or alitaliasucks.com for example. Nasty stuff, for sure. Not good corporate publicity, for sure. Bet the folks at eBay and Alitalia wish they’d grabbed these domain names before they were picked up by gripers. The cost of buying “ebaysucks.com” before someone else does is close to zero. It’s just a matter of anticipation. Of course, its hard for companies to challenge the ownership of sites like these, since a clever owner can claim First Amendment protection as long as he or she doesn’t misstep and use the domain in a way that results in consumer confusion. We often tell clients to buy up all the “surrounding” names for their domain of choice. The dot-COM, dot-ORG, dot-NET top level domains, and any offensive variations. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Occasionally, I’ve wondered how many of the large, Fortune 500-type U.S. companies create this kind of protection for themselves. Well,…
Read the full article →
October 15, 2008
One of the great benefits of the Suffolk Business Litigation Session (the BLS) is that the judges tend to write detailed opinions explaining their decisions. This tends to be less true elsewhere in the Superior Court. Recently-retired Superior Court Judge Allen van Gestel created a tradition of written jurisprudence while he headed the BLS, and his successors are keeping up the tradition. While these decisions are not published in an official reporter, and they are not binding precedent in the strict legal sense, they are often made available on the Internet, on legal search engines such as Westlaw and in the unofficial Mass. Law Reporter. In this way attorneys and the public are informed on how the BLS judges tend to see issues that come before them. And of course, any given judge is likely to be greatly influenced by a decision he or she has authored on a particular issue; there’s nothing better than citing a judge back to herself. The extensive and detailed opinion in The National Economic Research Associates, Inc. v. Evans, decided by Judge Ralph Gants in early September 2008, shows that the new BLS judges are continuing Judge van Gestel’s tradition of written decisions. In NERA v. Evans Judge Gants was asked to decide (on summary judgment) a claim that David Evans had violated a covenant not to compete with NERA, his former employer. The…
Read the full article →