From: Blunderov (squooker@mweb.co.za)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 15:07:14 MDT
[Blunderov]
Not just the e-mail companies are afflicted with a meme shortage apparently.
This from http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt.htm
Best Regards
<q>
17-3-04. A Chessplayer by Any Other Name. The China View news service is
reporting that 2001 FIDE Women's World Champion Zhu Chen is involved in a
battle to retain the rights to her name. Apparently a foreign (non-Chinese)
company tried to register the rights to the 28-year-old's name without her
knowledge.
Maybe she should also have a talk with a Mr. Carlos Moreno, who registered
zhuchen.com a month ago! (Earlier here I mistakenly identified the registrar
as the registrant due to fine print and laziness. My bad. Thanks for the
corrections.) It can take time, but it is now fairly routine for well-known
individuals and brands to get their name domains taken away from other
people. Carlos would have to make a good case for having zhuchen.com for
something other than reselling it to prevent a court from handing it over to
Zhu Chen. (Loads about this in the case regarding sting.com here.)
The unsavory practice of cyber-squatting also popped up in the chess world
in several places. When we started work on KasparovChess in 1999 one of the
biggest behind-the-scenes battles was about how some nut was squatting on
kasparov.com. He'd met Garry years earlier, done nothing with the project,
and ended up causing no end of trouble until it was finally awarded to
Kasparov in a long and expensive court battle.
We went on a domain-buying spree back then and many of those I registered
for the now-defunct company still show the old contact information. Back
then I noticed that a Spanish chess group had registered the domains of the
names of many top players.
There are some other curious ones out there. vishyanand.com,
vladimirkramnik.com, and peterleko.com are owned by my friends at the London
Chess Centre (who also have the coveted chess.co.uk). kramnik.com is owned
by his friend Miguel Illescas's chess school in Spain. KasparovChess offered
big bucks for chess.com, but in the net madness of the late 90s the fellow
at Chess Mentor turned down enough to retire on. Whoops.
It's interesting that the LCC has registered so many full names, which could
likely be taken away by their namesakes in court. (Even if they make
peterleko.com into a Peter Leko fan site a court could still call him the
rightful owner as a public figure in need of protecting his name and earning
power.) Meanwhile, paulmorphy.com is still available!
</q>
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