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I can understand the ruling. If you read "shell.de", do you think of Andreas Shell the attorney or Shell the mineral oil company? The name has been trademarked

I can understand the ruling. If you read "shell.de", do you think of Andreas Shell the attorney or Shell the mineral oil company? The name has been trademarked for eternity, why should trademarks used as domain names be treated any different? Anyone can use a name, but only for the thing it represents, German law has always been applied that way. The edge case is Deutsche Telekom and their sprawling claim on magenta, not this.

azinman2 9y ago
Because the Internet wasn’t created for trademarks. People can have the same name as a trademark, which likely goes back much further before the trademark was created.
PostOnce 9y ago
Well, suppose your site is "foobar.de" and you have been running a business from it for 10 years, and tomorrow, a rich man spends 100 million euros on advertising his new business Foobar Inc, and is overnight the better known party -- what kind of backwards legal system would hold that money trumps all other rights? First come first serve makes more sense, so long as it's not trademark infringement (i.e. he's not selling oil) on a preexisting trademark.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  The pragmatic approach would be for the smaller party to change names. This actually happened. Google couldn't operate Gmail under that name in Germany because a direct mailing company had registered it before and had been operating under that name for years. Eventually the domain changed hands, but that was only sometime after 2010.
  - PostOnce 9y ago
    Pragmatic for the rich only. The disadvantaged party now has to foot the bill for changing names and thereby losing customers who may not again find them. Why should a society give that sort of obsequious deference to the wealthy? What benefit to we gain? It's not as though shelloil.de or the German language equivalent would be so hard to find, or cost them any money or business at all, since no one goes to shell.de to buy oil directly -- it's pure vanity and cost some man his moral right. It's disgraceful. I would not want to live in a society where being rich gives you more rights, not just in practice, but in law, if that's in fact the case. Further, I scoff at this concept of pragmatism. Life is more than pragmatics, pragmatism can easily become a synonym for cruelty, as it has in the past, whether that's consumer safety, government funded medical, animal welfare, or any other situation that was previously dictated by economic pragmatism, to the detriment humanity.
bdcravens 9y ago
Depending on the audience, someone may not think about startups when thinking of “Y-Combinator”
frobozz 9y ago
Trademarks are domain-specific. Multiple unrelated organisations can and do have the same names in different industries. If you see 'apple.co.uk' do you think of iPhones and Macbooks, or do you think of "Hey Jude" and "Instant Karma"? Why one and not the other?

azinman2 9y ago

Because the Internet wasn’t created for trademarks. People can have the same name as a trademark, which likely goes back much further before the trademark was created.

PostOnce 9y ago

Well, suppose your site is "foobar.de" and you have been running a business from it for 10 years, and tomorrow, a rich man spends 100 million euros on advertising his new business Foobar Inc, and is overnight the better known party -- what kind of backwards legal system would hold that money trumps all other rights? First come first serve makes more sense, so long as it's not trademark infringement (i.e. he's not selling oil) on a preexisting trademark.

HarryHirsch 9y ago
The pragmatic approach would be for the smaller party to change names. This actually happened. Google couldn't operate Gmail under that name in Germany because a direct mailing company had registered it before and had been operating under that name for years. Eventually the domain changed hands, but that was only sometime after 2010.
- PostOnce 9y ago
  Pragmatic for the rich only. The disadvantaged party now has to foot the bill for changing names and thereby losing customers who may not again find them. Why should a society give that sort of obsequious deference to the wealthy? What benefit to we gain? It's not as though shelloil.de or the German language equivalent would be so hard to find, or cost them any money or business at all, since no one goes to shell.de to buy oil directly -- it's pure vanity and cost some man his moral right. It's disgraceful. I would not want to live in a society where being rich gives you more rights, not just in practice, but in law, if that's in fact the case. Further, I scoff at this concept of pragmatism. Life is more than pragmatics, pragmatism can easily become a synonym for cruelty, as it has in the past, whether that's consumer safety, government funded medical, animal welfare, or any other situation that was previously dictated by economic pragmatism, to the detriment humanity.

bdcravens 9y ago

Depending on the audience, someone may not think about startups when thinking of “Y-Combinator”

frobozz 9y ago

Trademarks are domain-specific. Multiple unrelated organisations can and do have the same names in different industries. If you see 'apple.co.uk' do you think of iPhones and Macbooks, or do you think of "Hey Jude" and "Instant Karma"? Why one and not the other?