MySpace was ingenious 6 years prior to existence!
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Maybe I read this wrong, but The Register has an article about Myspace winning the rights to MySpace.co.uk domain... that was registered 6 years before MySpace.com even existed. At the time of registration, it was offered as a subscription base and email service. It's domain owned by TWS (now News Corp) now only has 18 subscribers but has long since changed the face (even before Myspace.com still) of its site to show advertisements for social networking.
Plenty of notes were submitted by TWS about how the analytics of the site during the first appearance of MySpace.com did not have any relevant ads about their site until later when it became steadily popular in 2004. Rupert of Myspace.com claims that it was a retro abusive registration. Maybe I'm a little naive (and I say that a bit), but it seems to me that giving someone the ability to bully smaller businesses just because they are bigger and have popularity for a name does not mean they have rights to something they do not own especially for something that was owned 6 years prior.
By the end of the article, it states the following:
TWS had sought up to £220,000 in return for the domain when contacted by MySpace.
This only tells me they were reluctant in giving up the domain (they've had it for so long) and this is a minor insight: they could make millions off this sell. Obviously this was not an abusive registration. This only makes for a minor chilling effect but could present a problem in the future. If you grab a domain... possibly just for the name itself (whee! iamnaive.com) and email and place some advertisements on there for some relevant searches to go through and pick up some money to pay for the site hosting, watch out for those crafty new startups who may need it in the future when they're more popular than you.
Rulings like this sadden me. In the back of my mind; however, it seems like I'm reading this all wrong. Oh well, Rupert you win this time.
