Open letter to Kelsey Grammer: the Internet is not a trademark-free zone

Last night, Kelsey Grammer was on the Tonight Show, and he told Jay Leno that he'd started a Web site, kelseylive.com.

Jay, apparently being an astute Internaut, suggested that Kelsey ought to have set it up as kelseygrammer.com.

Kelsey replied that someone had already registered his name as a .com address, and that that someone wanted money for Kelsey to buy his own name back, and that he was unwilling to pay the amount wanted, so he was going to go with kelseylive.

I checked this morning, and sure enough, kelseygrammer.com is registered to a group called "Friend to Friend Foundation." They proclaim:

  This particular site on the World Wide Web has been   registered on behalf of the specific individual   referred to by the domain name. It is reserved for   their exclusive use.

They dress it up as if they're benevolent friends, but if Kelsey's got the story right, they're just domain speculators.

I've never been fond of the Internic's ready willingness to bow to big corporations who hold trademarks -- I think the roadrunner.com case was a travesty -- but it's hard to imagine how domain speculators in Kansas could own Kelsey's name. Shouldn't he just apply to the Internic for reassignment to him based on his trade name? Does he need to register a trademark in order to prevail?

(Oh, and by the way, Kelsey, lose the swimsuit photo.)

/rich

Rich Wiggins
<wiggins[_at_]msuvm3.cl.msu.edu> Received on Thu Nov 12 1998 - 16:10:29 GMT